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A Century of Folly

The first paper I ever wrote was on Aristotle at age 16. He was one of the important teachers in my life. His words became central to my life.

“All men desire to know, but not all forms of knowledge are equal, the best is the pure and disinterested search for the causes of things…

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them, for these only gave them life, those the art of living well…

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain…

What is the meaning of life? To serve others and do good… I love Plato, he said, but I love truth more.” – Aristotle

Those powerful words still guide my life. Words are small and deeds are monuments but both determine character and integrity. I teach my children that it is through words and deeds that either build strong foundations or they destroy relationships so think carefully about impacts before you speak and act. How we treat all life matters because we are connected through our genes and our epigenome. I’m trying to teach my children a far different ethical system than the one that surrounds us.

Studying nature is what Aristotle had done all those centuries ago. Aristotle was insistent that the crucial point of understanding in dissection comes when putting the parts back together to see how an animal works as a whole. This evolved into systemic biological research today. I study the complexity of natural and human systems and how they impact one another. That’s been my life’s work. The Greeks cast their science from first principles, without troubling to examine the natural world. Aristotle changed everything.

Ethics has never been created on a foundation of scientific understanding of the living world.

Most are unaware that Aristotle was the founding father of biology. Biology has radically advanced since he first created a systematic foundation of observations of the natural world and life.

Even Darwin remarked: “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.”

“Failure to understand what is obvious can be caused by inexperience: those who have spent more time with the natural world are better at suggesting theories of wide explanatory scope. Those who have spent time arguing instead of studying things as they are show all too clearly that they are incapable of seeing much at all.” – Aristotle

‘The passage comes from On Generation and Corruption. The argumentative types are the Platonists. Their obsessions – intangible Forms, numerology and geometry – caused them to deny the evidence of their own eyes. They were blind to the structure of the world, this world. The passage is a prelude to the Invitation to Biology. For, when Aristotle said that we must attend to even the humblest creatures since there are gods there too, he was not only urging some students to pick up their cuttlefish, he was arguing, as he would until the end, with Plato’s shade. He was doing what every scientist who opens a new domain of enquiry must do: defend it before his peers. Of the whole, vast natural world, the Academy deemed only the stars worthy of study. But, and this is Aristotle’s point, we do not live along the stars: we live here, on Earth….’

Orion stargazer

“It’s not good enough simply to study the stars, no matter how perfect and divine they may be, rather we must also study the humblest of creatures, even if they seem repugnant to us. And that is because all animals have something of the good, something of the divine, something of the beautiful.. In all things of nature there is something of the marvellous.”
— Aristotle

‘Nor do we live just anywhere on Earth… Lesbos and the lagoon at Pyrrha gave to Aristotle a place, calm and lovely, where he could be among natural things… Biologists often have such places. They need them, for ideas do not come from nothing, they come from nature…

I live in a nation of fools that are ruled by fools who are all willfully blind to the true structure of the world and the life they destroy.

This is worth repeating once again..

“Failure to understand what is obvious can be caused by inexperience: those who have spent more time with the natural world are better at suggesting theories of wide explanatory scope. Those who have spent time arguing instead of studying things as they are show all too clearly that they are incapable of seeing much at all.” – Aristotle

(I’d replace “inexperience” with the ignorance of the complexity of our biological and ecological systems)

Aristotle’s Lagoon

Our genes are the building blocks that connect all life forms. All life forms are complex ecosystems full of other life forms. Only microbes are individuals. Rachel Carson had yet to understand that the mitochondria in every eukaryotic cell are microbes. She would then understand much more had she read, “Symbiontism and The Origin of Species” by Ivan Emmanuel Wallin – 1927 but all researchers fall prey to blindspots… You have to cast a very wide net searching to to understand the natural world in all its complexity.

Powerful economic interests keep subject fields in silo order for a reason… connecting important multidisciplinary dots provides understanding of human health and would provide enlightenment of how the systems and products they sell destroy it. They would be unable to make profits off those who buy their destructive systems. The main problem with this analysis conducted back in 1962 was that there was zero examination of the actual food and agricultural system created in the first place. Does the agricultural and food system built on hydrocarbon technologies even provide health? Of course not… and yet it continues today. Childhood cancer has increased 67% and the health of our children is being completely destroyed.

Our children’s health has further deteriorated since this Rachel Carson Documentary first aired in the 1960s.
1960s Rachel Carson Documentary

When will the fools wake up and realize that those who have been selling them the systems that have been destroying children’s health for a century are not to be trusted? They have little to no foundation of biological knowledge and yet they go once again full steam ahead with so little understanding of health.

A resting infant has twice the air intake and oxygen needs as an adult and yet they are creating a required mask policy in our education system that deprives children of much needed oxygen for healthy development! The average indoor oxygen levels are around 25%. OSHA federal laws mandate that all employers require a minimum of 19.5% oxygen rates for their worker’s health. Adults wearing masks in indoor air spaces are only receiving approximately 17.5% oxygen. Got that? What do you think will be the result for our smallest most vulnerable children?

All microbes and viruses need water to survive. Direct sunlight radiation destroys them rather quickly. Flu is seasonal for many reasons and that’s one and the other is because few are deficient in vitamin D (the hormone our body makes from evolving with sunlight radiation) during the warm months.

The Biology of Skin Color. We only evolved with sunlight radiation not substances that are radioactive. Radiaoactive substances hijack our normal biological interaction with the sun.

The Biology of Skin Color Video

Sad that so many fear the things that provide them with health and are continuing to utilize the things that never degrade and destroy themselves. They buy them by the multi-millions because they are told that they “protect” them…

Insanity, if you ask me….

Those PFC coated facemasks are doing the opposite of protecting working class citizens… clearly working class fools rarely learn the most important history and science lessons about Wall Street and capital ruling class.

Working class citizens bought radium after the 1929 capitalist heist and drank it. Notice how much they pervert science? Nature’s laws? They conceal the truth of how their radium market products destroy calcium… They knew it was dangerous because Pierre Curie published harm decades before…
“Drink plenty of fresh, invigorating, natural radioactive water from the Radium-Spa.”

Radium perverted propaganda

An American Industrialist, Eben Byers, drank a bottle a day for four years, at the end of which he died in excruciating pain from cancer of the jaw as his facial bones disintegrated…. This image of the biological damage was never featured in capital propaganda selling radium products and the markets continued to grow and expand.
Eben Byers radium drinker
They are still selling fools that radiation is harmless…
Grace Fryer is still a hero. She was a radium girl who knew she was dying and spent the rest of her life trying to warn all women of how destructive radium was because it was destroying her health and taking her life.  She didn’t want others to suffer or have the same fate. She’s my comrade. Capitalists slandered her and she never gave up trying to warn the working class being destroyed by the markets built off radium technologies.
The Tragic Story of The Radium Girls: Grace Fryer Documentary
Calcium is a metal.
“Except for its radioactivity, radium has the same chemistry as calcium. Like calcium it will form chlorides, or sulfates, or carbonates…. There was no money to buy the needed ore but Pierre went to Edward Suess, president of the Academy of Sciences of Vienna, and asked what happened to the pitchblende ore residue from which uranium had already been removed… With ingenuity, Pierre persuaded Suess to arrange for the Austrian government to give them this seemingly worthless material at no cost. Then he went to the Baron Edmond de Rothschild and asked him for a donation to cover the cost of transportation. Over the next four years, Rothschild, who at that time remained anonymous, gave repeated donations for this purpose.” – Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie  (Pages 91 – 92, 99)

Marie Currie

Many upper class men and women carried in their pockets or purses glass vials containing tiny particles of radium bromide..
When Pierre (Curie) heard of this, he wrote a paper warning about the danger… but perhaps flirting with danger was alluring to affluent people as was the frequent use of morphine injections and cocaine (Merck and Bayer, IG Farben products, of course)…
Even those called genius have blindposts and Marie Curie’s blindspot was the entire field of biology.
 – Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie
(And Israel is still the global supplier of bromide based poisons today….)

And yet, parents “believe” radioativity is harmless to their children’s development….

“Failure to understand what is obvious can be caused by inexperience (ignorance in the complexity of biological systems): those who have spent more time with the natural world are better at suggesting theories of wide explanatory scope. Those who have spent time arguing instead of studying things as they are show all too clearly that they are incapable of seeing much at all.” – Aristotle

And so blind fools continue supporting ruling class blind fools…. falling prey to authority fallacy…

Our children suffer greatly for the intellectually lazy adults our culture produces…

“Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are toxic chemicals that adversely affect human health and the environment around the world. Because they can be transported by wind and water, most POPs generated in one country can and do affect people and wildlife far from where they are used and released. They persist for long periods of time in the environment and can accumulate and pass from one species to the next through the food chain (and from one generation to the next). To address this global concern, the United States joined forces with 90 other countries and the European Community to sign a groundbreaking United Nations treaty Exit in Stockholm, Sweden, in May 2001. Under the treaty, known as the Stockholm Convention, countries agreed to reduce or eliminate the production, use, and/or release of 12 key POPs (see box), and specified under the Convention a scientific review process that has led to the addition of other POPs chemicals of global concern.”
https://www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/persistent-organic-pollutants-global-issue-global-response

Dioxin still contaminates all those organochlorine products fools continue buying to “protect” themselves from “germs.”…. Idiocy abounds…

Truth and understanding does not always provide happiness when you clearly see the continued folly of our species and are unable to alter its destructive course…

I want to protect and save children’s health while everyone wants to continue serving and idolizing scientifically illiterate psychopathic “eugenic” fools……

I can do nothing because I have no following, no power and no monetary support…because I refuse to sell anything.
the sick irony…

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The evolutionary development of males provides critically important understanding and insight into the biological vulnerabilities of males.

Book excerpt from Your Inner Fish
Shark Past: Hernias

“Our propensity for hernias near the groin, results from taking a fish body and morphing it into a mammal.

Fish have gonads that extend toward their chest, approaching their heart. Mammals don’t, and therein lies the problem. It is a good thing that our gonads are not deep in our chest and near our heart (although it might make reciting the Pledge of Allegiance a different experience). If our gonads were in our chest, we wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

Slit the belly of a shark from mouth to tail. The first thing you’ll see is liver, a lot of it. The liver of a shark is gigantic. Some zoologists believe that a large liver contributes to the buoyancy of the shark. Move the liver away and you’ll find the gonads extending up near the heart, in the “chest” area. This arrangement is typical of most fish: the gonads lie toward the front of the body.

In us, as in most mammals, this arrangement would be a disaster. Males continuously produce sperm throughout their lives. Sperm are finicky little cells that need exactly the right range of temperatures to develop correctly for the three months they live. Too hot, and sperm are malformed; too cold, and they die. Male mammals have a neat little device for controlling the temperature of the sperm-making apparatus: the scrotum. As we all know, the male gonads sit in a sac. Inside the skin of the sac are muscles that can expand and contract as the temperature changes. Muscles also can expand and contract as the temperature changes. Muscles also lie in our sperm cords. Hence, the cold shower effect: the scrotum will tuck close to the body when it is cold. The whole package rises and falls with temperature. This is all a way to optimize the production of healthy sperm.

The dangling scrotum also serves as a sexual signal in many mammals. Between the physiological advantages of having gonads outside the body wall, and the occasional benefits this provides in securing mates, there are ample advantages for our distant mammalian ancestors in having a scrotum.

The problem with this arrangement is that the plumbing that carries sperm to the penis is circuitous. Sperm travel from the testes in the scrotum through the sperm cord. The cord leaves the scrotum, travels up toward the waist, loops over the pelvis, then goes through the pelvis to travel through the penis and out. Along this complex path, the sperm gain seminal fluids from a number of glands that connect to the tube.

The reason for this absurd route lies in our development and evolutionary history. Our gonads begin in development in much the same place as the shark’s: up near our livers. As they grow and develop, our gonads descend. In females, the ovaries descend from the midsection to lie near the uterus and fallopian tubes. This ensures that the egg does not have far to travel to be fertilized. In males, the descent goes farther.

The descent of the gonads, particularly in males, creates a weak spot in the body wall. To envision what happens when the testes and spermatic cord descend to form a scrotum, imagine pushing your fist against a rubber sheet. In this example, your fist becomes equivalent to the testes and your arm to the spermatic cord. The problem is that you have created a weak space where your arm sits. Where once the rubber sheet was a simple wall, you’ve now made another space, between your arm and the rubber sheet, where things can slip. This is essentially what happens in many types of inguinal hernias in men. Some of these inguinal hernias are congenital—when a piece of the gut travels with the testes as it descends. Another kind of inguinal hernia is acquired. When we contract our abdominal muscles, our guts push against the body wall. A weakness in the body wall means that guts can escape the body cavity and be squeezed to lie next to the spermatic cord.

Females are far tougher than males, particularly in this part of the body. Because females do not have a giant tube running through it, their abdominal wall is much stronger that a man’s. This is a good thing when you think of the enormous stresses that female body walls go through during pregnancy and childbirth. A tube through the body wall just wouldn’t do. Men’s tendency to develop hernias is a trade-off between our fish ancestry and our mammal present.” – pages 193 – 196

As you can see male evolution leads to biological vulnerabilities. Hormones were critically important in the evolution of male reproductive morphology from their fish to mammal development. Those hormones played the staring role in the descent of male testicles from their abdomen to their current location. What happens when those hormones are disrupted and those testicles don’t descend?

My 12-year-old son commented, “Mom, Oscar stayed a fish!” That was his statement while we were watching, “Your Inner Fish.” (He’s a smart little bugger) I explained to him why his cousin’s health was altered when he had an undescended testicle and why the doctors should have removed it altogether. It would immediately prevent and lower his cancer risks and here’s why.

Our Stolen Future provided much understanding.

“British researchers report a doubling in the number of cases of undescended testicles in England and Wales between 1962 and 1981, and similar increases have been reported in Sweden and Hungary. Men with undescended testicles have a higher risk of testicular cancer and typically have lower sperm counts and more abnormal sperm. There also appears to be an increasing incidence of the genital defect hypospadia.

In his earlier work, Skakkebaek had slowly accumulated evidence that all these abnormalities stem from developmental errors that take place in the womb, leading him to suspect they might have a common cause. He first found signs that prenatal event might play a role in testicular cancer while exploring the causes of male infertility. Examining tissue samples taken from the testicles of infertile men, he noticed strange-looking cells resembling the fetal germ cells that evolve during normal development into the testicular cells that produce and nurture sperm in mature males. The next clue came when some of the infertile men with aberrant cells later developed testicular cancer. Then he found the same abnormal cells in a boy with undescended testicles, who also developed cancer a decade later. It appeared that the abnormal cells had given rise to the testicular cancer and that men suffering from infertility or certain genital defects were at greater risk of having such cells.

At the same time that Skakkebaek was conducting his review of sperm numbers, another researcher in Edinburgh, Scotland, was also puzzling about the increase in male reproductive problems. Richard Sharpe of the Medical Research Council’s Reproductive Biology Unit was exploring possible explanations for the increase in undescended testicles and the drop in human male sperm counts. He, too, began to suspect that prenatal events might be responsible.

When Sharpe and Skakkebaek met at a conference and discovered they were thinking along similar lines, they began collaborating. In May 1993, they published a paper in the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, proposing that the cause of the falling sperm counts and increased reproductive abnormalities in men was increased exposure to estrogens in the womb. They cited the DES experience and laboratory studies as support for this hypothesis, noting that prenatal exposure to elevated levels of synthetic or natural estrogens resulted in reduced sperm counts and an increase in the incidence of undescended testicles, hypospadias, and possibly testicular tumors in male offspring.

Animal studies had also provided an insight into how elevated estrogen levels in the womb might limit the number of sperm a male produces in adulthood by inhibiting the multiplication of key cells in the testicles known as Sertoli cells, which orchestrate and regulate the production of sperm. Since each Sertoli cell can support only a fixed number of sperm, the number a male acquires early in life will ultimately limit the number of sperm he can produce as an adult. During male development, the pituitary gland secretes a follicle-stimulating hormone and thereby limits the growth of Sertoli cell numbers.

Of course, one has to bear in mind that many chemicals can undermine male fertility, acting not just before birth but during childhood and adulthood as well. Prenatal exposure to synthetic estrogens is just one of many assaults on male reproductive potential. As we’ve seen, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reproductive toxicologist Earl Gray has discovered that some synthetic chemicals act as potent androgen blockers and may pose an even greater threat to males than estrogen chemicals. Nevertheless, Sharpe and Skakkebaek’s theory offers an eminently plausible explanation of how estrogens might be having a major impact of male fertility by disrupting development….

The latest sperm count studies, however, add weight to the theory that the cause of the precipitous drop in sperm counts in some prenatal event rather than later damage caused by chemical contaminants or bad habits. If sperm counts were dropping because of adult exposure to increased contamination, smoking, or alcohol or because of venereal disease, they would be dropping in older men as well as younger men. The fact that the sperm counts are lower in younger men and correlate inversely with date of birth argues that the damage was done in the womb.” – Our Stolen Future by Theo Colborn (pages 175 – 177)

And males, that’s why you should care a great deal about female health because your first home is a womb and it’s being destroyed which directly impacts your own health. Dr. Theo Colborn rightly called our ruling class industrialists “womb terrorists.” They certainly know how to manufacture many kinds of terrorists all across our globe and they cause much destruction.

Biological development is a remarkable orchestration that makes a symphony boring in comparison. The sonic hedgehog gene is responsible for building the hand. The gene is like first violin and when it gets turned on, it chemically alerts the entire string section to play so all the digits form properly. Sniper fire from an organochlorine munition like thalidomide silences the sonic hedgehog gene and many other critically important genes during development so the entire string section remains silenced and no limbs are formed.

Some genes like the Sox9 are triggered to play by hormones so instead of the strings playing, the trumpets belt it out and males form. Unfortunately for some males, their development is altered by munition technologies from the benzene branch and they are feminized or suffer from teeny weeny syndrome and more…

Sox9? That’s the best name they could come up with for such a critically important gene? (Poor males! That’s not going to stick in anyone’s brain! Rocket launcher gene…)

Hormones: Chemical Messengers That Work in Parts per Trillion From Our Stolen Future Theo Colborn

Sex determination is regulated by the Sox9 gene. During testis differentiation, this gene is directly targeted by the product of the Y chromosome–encoded gene Sry. The regulatory region of Sox9 is complex, which is typical of genes with multiple roles in development. Gonen et al. find that a single far-upstream 557–base pair element is critical for up-regulating Sox9. Without it, XY mice develop as females instead of males. The 557–base pair enhancer is conserved, likely to be relevant to human disorders of sex differentiation, and probably essential because it acts early in a time-critical process, and any failure allows ovary-specific factors to dominate.

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10059532/

Sex reversal following deletion of a single distal enhancer of Sox9

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/1469

Their technologies have hijacked and destroyed so much life and health. When will you wake up and stop attacking victims and focus on the capitalist ruling class perpetrators and their technologies destroying us all?

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Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer

Chapter 1: Enter the Experts
“Lazar was particularly interested in “dissocial” youths who had fallen afoul with the law. He felt it important to differentiate what he called endogenous and exogenous causes—between children whose disociability stemmed from internal factors (physical or psychiatric) versus external factors (illness or milieu).In endogenous cases, Lazar boasted that his Curative Education Clinic was “the first attempt” to distinguish between “the mental and physical defects of the wayward and criminal.” Committed to physiological detail, for example, Lazar would examine the genitals of a child “right away,” and send boys whose testicles had not dropped to a surgeon….

For all his purported idealism, Lazar could be damning in his judgements. As his coworkers put it, “He was not sentimental,” and would pronounce children “morally” damaged, “degenerate,” or even “waste.”….

Chapter 5: Fatal Theories
Jekelius wrote to her parents that he had done them a service: “you and the child will be spared much suffering.” Because Paula had “Mongolian idiocy” (Down syndrome), she “would never have walked or learned to speak, and would have been a constant burden for you.”

However, the true intent of the child euthanasia program was not to make life easier for parents, but to purge the Reich of undesirable citizens. And child killers were holding very different conversations among themselves.

*(Should note that the author is not educated in endocrine disruption science nor fetal development or she would have understood the significance of an epidemic of boys born with undescended testicles and children born with Down Syndrome. Their munition technology causes have been known since the 1950s. Since IG Farben had market expansion plans it would have been in their best interest to destroy any evidence that their products caused harm.)

 

Chapter 6: Asperger and the Killing System
While Asperger effectively worked down the hall. Hamburger who supervised numerous medical experiments on children at the Children’s Hospital. One medical student exposed children and infants to extreme temperature changes and measured the effects. Elmar Turk, one of Asperger’s associates as a postdoctoral student under Hamburger, used premature infants to study the effect of vitamin D on rickets; knowing that premature babies were particularly susceptible to the condition, Turk withheld prophylaxis, allowing thirteen of the fifteen infants in his control group to develop rickets.

Hamburger took special interest in Turk’s lethal tuberculosis experiments on children. Turk selected babies as his test subjects who he considered to be “severely damaged from birth trauma, unviable, and idiotic.” He administered a tuberculosis vaccine, Calmette-Guerin (BCG), to two of them, and then infected all three babies with “virulent tuberculosis bacillus.” He sent them to Speigelgrund for observation and, eventually, autopsies. The two vaccinated babies died within a month—not of tuberculosis, but reportedly of pneumonia, the main official cause of death at Spiegelgrund. The unvaccinated child overcame the tuberculosis after a painful four-month ordeal but still died.

Turk repeated his tuberculosis experiment one year later on an “idiotic, syphilitic” three-and-a-half-year-old, Adolf Guttmann, whom he did not. As he transferred little Adolf to Spiegelgrund for observation, Turk sent a macabre so-called “wish list” to the director for the boy’s death and postmortem study: “I would request that you inform me in the event of the child’s death so that I may be present at the autopsy, as I intend to conduct various histological examinations.” While the child still lived, Spiegelgrund staff were to take specialized notes on Adolf’s condition and conduct x-rays at regular intervals. Turk added, “I hope you are not burdened by this.” After Adolf arrived at Spiegelgrund, staff reported that the boy “was quiet and peaceful, laughs occasionally when one strokes him on the cheek.” Adolf was killed two and a half months after his arrival…

Hamburger’s postdoctoral student Heribert Goll, with whom Asperger had copublished in 1939, also conducted experiments on babies at the Children’s Hospital. Overseen by Hamburger, Goll explained that he selected “only infants unfit to live.” For his 1941 publication in the Munich Medical Weekly, Goll deprived babies of Vitamin A in order to measure the vitamin’s effects on the development of keratomalacia, a common cause of blindness. The condition dried the cornea and membrane that covers the white of the eye, resulting potentially, over time, in frothy patches called Bitot spots, ulceration, infection, and rupture of the eye. After Goll, withheld vitamin A from the infants for months, a number of them did, indeed, develop preliminary keratomalacia. Then, in a second experiment, Goll sought to infect babies with keratomalacia by placing secretions from the eye of one girl with the disease onto the eyes of four healthy children. When the method failed, he tried again by localizing the bacteria, which again failed.

Goll raised the stakes of his research in his 1942 publication for the Munich Medical Weekly, depriving twenty babies of fats and vitamin A in periods of up to three hundred days. After the infants died—perhaps forcibly killed, perhaps perishing from their maltreatment—Goll examined their livers from autopsies. Six-month-old Anna Mick was selected for the study; her health had been “robust” despite her hydrocephalus and bed sores on her head. She wasted away on Goll’s diet, lying in the Children’s Hospital while staff prodded her eyes and body for fluid and tissue samples. In less than four months, Anna died from “increasing feebleness.”

Asperger worked in the midst of his colleagues’ human experiments at the Children’s Hospital and would have known about their deadly methods, which they touted in prominent journals. He walked past babies in daily life who were injected, infected, and starved… Asperger—in cofounding the Vienna Society for Curative Education with Franz Hamburger, Erwin Jekelius, and Max Gundel in 1941—was collaborating with three top perpetrators of child killing in Vienna…

Asperger then brought up “eugenic issues” before the Vienna Society, pointing out that “proper assessment” of children was “already a good portion of their ‘treatment.’” Again, one could take these words at face value, as advocating careful care of children. But “treatment,” or Behandlung, was a euphemism that euthanasia personnel used for killing a child. It is curious that Asperger used quotation marks around the word, which suggests he might, indeed, be signaling a veiled meaning for “‘treatment’” —especially on the heels of recommending “prolonged and stationary observation” at Spiegelgrund. After all, the Vienna Society was run by notorious Spiegelgrund leaders, and Jekelius’s inaugural address had already set the stage with his reference to children unworthy of care. Given widespread knowledge of the euthanasia program in Vienna, it is likely that many in the audience were aware of the potential consequences of sending “difficult cases” to Spiegelgrund, as well as the regime’s desire to eliminate children deemed to be defective…..

Heirich Gross, one of the most notorious figures, came to work at Spiegelgrund in mid-November 1940 as child killing were gaining momentum. He was barely twenty-six, having graduated from the University of Vienna Medical School just the year before and worked for a short time at the psychiatric institution Ybbs an der Donau. At Spiegelgrund, Gross served under medical director Jekelius, ten years his senior. Like Jekelius, Gross had been a Nazi enthusiast when the party was still a fringe terrorist organization in Austria; he joined the Hitler Youth in 1932 and the SA in 1933, gaining successive promotions to SA squad leader by 1938.

Seven months after Gross came to work at Spiegelgrund, in June 1941, he went to Germany to train for six weeks under curative education proponent Hans Heinze, who taught killing methods to spiring euthanasia doctors, one of the top three figures in child euthanasia in the entire Reich.

When Gross returned to Vienna after his training with Heinze, the death rate at Spiegelgrund more than tripled… Gross also emulated Heinze in harvesting and preserving victims’ brains. Heinze was distributing many hundreds of adult and child brains to German physicians for research as Gross began his collection of children’s brains at Spiegelgrund for his own work. Children at Spiegelgrund called Gross, who practiced medicine in military uniform, “scythe” or the “Grim Reaper.” (The preservation and research of victim brains is evidence that they would have been able to examine and see the morphological changes to the brain from their organochlorine munition technologies.)

The second director of Spiegelgrund, Ernst Illing, also trained with Heinze. Like Heinze, Illing had spent his early career at the University of Leipzig, and Illing then followed Heinze to Gorden in 1935. Illing worked under Heinze for seven years, conducting some fo the Reich’s first child killings. Illing was highly trained, then, when Heinze and Vienna’s Public Health Office tapped him, at age thirty-eight, to succeed Jekelius as medical director of Spiegelgrund, where he served from July 1, 1942, until April 1945….

And child euthanasia came to pervade Vienna’s medical community at large, reaching far beyond just curative education, as many doctors acquiesced and even welcomed the measures. Illing described in his October 1945 deposition how Viennese physicians readily ridded their wards of children they deemed disabled. He singled out Hamburger and Asperger’s Children’s Hospital by name:

My clinic was always overcrowded since the other clinics, the Welfare Clinic, the Children’s Hospital Glanzing, and the University Children’s Hospital handed over, or wanted to hand over, these hopeless cases—obviously in the belief that euthanasia was legally possible at my clinic due to the aforementioned directive [euthanasia order], while they themselves were not allowed to conduct euthanasia. I am completely confident that the leaders of these institutions were in the know about euthanasia and the aforementioned directives.

Asperger had publicly encouraged his colleagues to transfer “difficult cases” of children to Spiegelgrund—and he followed his own recommendation…

Austrian scholar Herwig Czech has uncovered that Asperger’s panel reviewed the files of 210 children in a single day, slotting them into special schools supposedly appropriate to their level of disability. The commission deemed 35 of the 210 children, 9 girls and 26 boys, “incapable of educational and developmental engagement.” These youths were sent to Spiegelgrund, as the written committee instructions required, to be “dispatched for Jekelius Action.”

“Jekelius Action” was an instruction to kill. All of the 35 youths transferred by Asperger’s commission died. …

At Spiegelgrund, Herta’s photograph showed her crying, her dark hair shaved, and staring straight into the camera. Herta’s mother reportedly beseeched doctor Margarethe Hubsch, in tears: “If the child could not be helped, perhaps it would be better if she would die, as she would have nothing in this world anyway, she would be a laughing stock of the others.” Hubsch explained that, “as a mother of so many other children, she would not wish that on her, so it would be better if she died.” Herta’s mother conveyed at least some of her sentiments to Asperger, too, as he noted in his Spiegelgrund transfer order that “when at home, this child must present an unbearable burden to the mother.” On August 8, Jekelius sent Herta’s records to the Reich Committee in Berlin for authorization to kill the girl. Herta died soon thereafter, two months after Asperger’s transfer. Pneumonia was Herta’s official cause of death. (Herta was only two-years-old)

Chapter 7: The Daily Life of Death
Spiegelgrund’s second director, Ernst Illing, inflicted diagnostic practices on children that could be deadly. Pneumatic encephalography, for example, was an excruciating procedure that injected air into children’s brains after the removal of spinal fluid in order to conduct X-rays showing the cerebral ventricles. Spiegelgrund doctors also collected children’s body parts for research. Most notorious was Dr. Heinrich Gross, who preserved the brains of over four hundred children in jars meticulously stacked and labeled on shelves in the basement, which he used in his research through the 1980s. Indeed, the body parts of children killed at Spiegelgrund were disseminated among a number of research facilities, providing the basis of research long after the war….

Deaths also became part of the daily routine. Marianne Turk and Heinrich Gross even resided on the Spiegelgrund grounds, with Ernst Illing choosing to live with his family in Pavilion 15, the death ward. After the war, Turk reflected on just how habituated she had become to the life of murder, ordering overdoses of Luminal, Veronal, and morphine in injections and in pulverized tablets added to cocoa powder or other foods that children would gladly eat. “With the cases that we had by the dozens in the institution, putting an end to this human wretchedness was an automatic thought.” Turk outlined how the implementation of death orders was quotidian, too:

“The nurses—who undertook the actual execution since they added the sleeping pills to the food—had access to the medicine cabinet. They would be told by Dr. Illing or me that the decisions about child X or Y had arrived, and the nurses knew what they had to do.”…

The mother of Herta Gschwandtner, Luise, openly confronted Spiegelgrund staff about the killings. Herta was born “mongoloid,” and transferred to Spiegelgrund in 1943 at one-and-half years old. She died just eleven days after her transfer, ostensibly of pneumonia. Luise Gschwandnter was incredulous at the speed of her daughter’s death. She wrote to Ernst Illing and Spiegelgrund nurses, “I still can’t grasp why my dear little Herta had to leave me so fast, to die so quickly. […] We still can not believe that our child Herthi was not curable.” Gschwandtner went on, “I am completely heartbroken. I would gladly sacrifice my life for my child…. Please excuse me for my bad writing, which I wrote with very tearful eyes.” In her letter, Gschwandtner went so far as to suggest that Herta was murdered. “Now I have to bear twice the pain because people are saying straight to my face that she was simply poisoned, so to speak, eliminated.” Illing wrote back that nothing was amiss with her daughter’s death. He warned Gschwandtner that he would launch police action if the deaths at Spiegelgrund continued to be questioned: “I would also ask you to vigorously oppose rumors of that kind; if necessary, I will lodge a complaint against such rumormongers.”

But rumors about the killings were rife in Vienna, and exacerbated families’ anguish over the deaths of their children. The parents of two-month-old Hermann Dockl were devastated when their daughter, diagnosed as “mongoloid,” perished five weeks after her admission to Spiegelgrund, reportedly of pneumonia. The Dockl’s family doctor, Hans Geyer, asked Illing to give him a medical accounting of Hermine’s death in order to alleviate the relatives’ torment; he said a proper explanation would bring the family “peace and dispel all the hushed rumors and conjectures.” Hermine’s mother, Geyer warned, was “expressing suicidal intentions and cannot be left alone.” Illing replied simply that the infant had “severe weakness of life” and that the good doctor should surely know that “mongoloid” children had shorter life expectancies.”

The majority of parents’ letters in the case files of children killed at Spiegelgrund are heart wrenching. They voice sorrow, disbelief, anger—and frequently demand more information about how their children died. There was, nevertheless, a wide range of responses. A number of families expressed acceptance, even approval of their child’s untimely death. After all, many in the Reich even sought their child’s admission to killing wards in the hopes their child might perish. They might complain about the burden of caring for their child, perhaps while struggling to make ends meet, with other children at home or a husband away at war. Yet discussions of child-killing was not just limited to to the strains of the Third Reich. The idea of ending “life unworthy of life” had circulated long before the Nazis came to power. In 1925, Ewald Meltzer, the head of the asylum in Saxony, grew so concerned about the ethics of the issue that he asked the parents of children at his institution: “Would you agree to the painless curtailment of the life of your child if experts had established that it was suffering from incurable idiocy?” To his dismay, 73 percent of the parents who participated in the survey answered “yes.”

Spiegelgrund staff said that some parents held explicit conversations about death wishes for their children. The mother of a toddler who Asperger transferred to Spiegelgrund, Herta Schreiber, allegedly told doctor Margarethe Hubsch, “It would be better if she died.” Marianne Turk noted that one mother of a child with epilepsy “thought it would be a comfort and a reassurance to her if the child could close her eyes forever.” Both children were, indeed, killed…

Survivor Leopoldine Maier, contemplating her experience at Spiegelgrund, suggested that complicity in the cruelty—and in the Nazis system as a whole—was pervasive and inescapable. She said people’s potential for depravity would torment her throughout her life.

“Each person raises the question in me: Are you for me or against me? It was always a question of survival. And that question still lingers with me somehow when I meet somebody: With whom is he siding now and with whom was he siding then. And would he have helped you had he known or would he not have helped you at all. […] I am not angry with anybody for how can you be mad with somebody when the evil has no name, when the evil is just part of life, like it was the case there. But the evil belonged there, it was everyday life, and nobody questioned it.”

Chapter 9: In Service to the Volk
The mission of eliminated undesirable children mirrored the Reich’s ambition to eliminate undesirable populations. While Nazi psychiatrists killed youths at home, sequestered behind the walls of hospitals and sanatoria, the Reich wreaked Armageddon across the continent…

The Nazi state aimed to establish a new order in Europe. From 1939 until 1942, its goal appeared to be in sight. The Reich occupied territories, created satellite states, and forged alliances across eastern and western Europe, from Bulgaria to Estonia to Norway to France. Germany even had aspirations in North Africa, too, waging war in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.

In Vienna, most people, including Asperger, supported the Reich. Many were pleased that the Nazi state invested in rebuilding the Austrian economy; Germany coordinated Austria into its war machine, unemployment dropped, large firms boomed, commerce modernized….. The former nation became seven Reich districts, or Reichsgaue, that were collectively called the Ostmark and, after 1942, the “Danubian and Alpine Districts.” The new boundaries tripled the size of greater Vienna, making it the second-largest city in the Reich—yet the regime reduced Vienna’s power from a capital to a provincial city and kept Austria peripheral to the Reich overall…

For Asperger and his associates in Vienna, quality of life remained relatively high throughout the war. Reich citizens fared well compared to the populations they subjugated, typically better fed, housed, and spared the ravages of the battlefield.

*(This author clearly never read the book, The Last Train From Berlin, by Howard K. Smith, 1942. Independent journalists tell a far different story about the state of “Reich citizens.” )

Vienna was also spared the worst of Allied bombing. The Allies unleashed explosives on sixty-one Reich cities during the war, destroying one in five homes and killing around six hundred thousand civilians; the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Dresden raised street temperatures over 1,500 degrees Celsius that turned people into ash in seconds. But Vienna, known as the “Reich’s air raid shelter,” was out of reach until the Allies established bombing flotillas in Italy in the spring of 1944. Missions then aimed for tactical targets in the city rather than carpet bombing, and killed twenty-four thousand civilians.

As Europe collapsed, Germans and Austrians continued to sustain the Reich. Asperger and his colleagues worked through the destruction, publishing, debating, and delivering lectures to one another. Nazi child psychiatry was only a small pocket of activity within the regime’s efforts to remake Europe. But practitioners took their task seriously, and continued to work in earnest even as the continent descended into mass slaughter.
The Third Reich harnessed a curious juxtaposition of efforts, of total war versus erudite debates, of genocide versus journal articles. But the task to mold the mind mattered, as psychiatrists discussed the finer points of Nazi philosophy while carnage raged around them…

Later in life, Asperger emphasized what he had gained from his time in Yugoslavia, highlighting his fortitude and heroism. Echoing longstanding masculine ideals of proving one’s mettle in battle, Asperger recalled, “I was in Croatia, deployed in the partisan war. I wouldn’t want to have missed any of these experiences. It is good to know how you behave when facing danger, as the bullets whistle by—it is also a place where you are tested.”

Apparently Asperger found fulfillment amid the carnage and the Wehrmacht’s notoriously vicious conduct in Yugoslavia. Reich reprisal policy, for example, meant killing one hundred citizens for every German soldier killed….

Chapter 10: Reckoning.
Spiegelgrund survivors continued to suffer after their release. For Franz Pulkert, life did not improve much. “The violence, that was commonplace at the time, I mean, with my parents this wasn’t different either, because my mother wasn’t any better.” Friedrich Zawrel recalled, “My father continued drinking. At home, it was as bad as before.” Karl Hamedler, who was in his mid-teens, was bitter. “At that age you just don’t know what to do with yourself. There you are in the world, and nobody gives a shit about you, to put it bluntly. Even Leopoldine Maier, whose mother had journeyed to Spiegelgrund every week and rescued her, was troubled. She confessed, “I also very often ran away from my mother. I always had my bag with leftover food so I would not starve.”….

For Leopoldine Maier, legal recognition was cold comfort. She was still “crippled by these childhood memories,” she explained. “When I do not watch myself, I always pull my neck in as if I were in constant fear of being hit in the neck with a stick or something else. […] Whenever I wake up in the morning, I tell myself that I am old and it is over and that to me it will never happen again. This is my ritual each and every morning. I tell myself it is over and I survived it.”

Maier dedicated her life to sustaining life. She became a nurse in Vienna and, she said, “I would have loved to have a child just to spare the child what I had to go through.” But Maier found her fallopian tubes were blocked. Although there is no record of it in her files, she suspects she was sterilized during the Third Reich. Haunted by Spiegelgrund’s physical and mental abuse, Maier confided, “The term ‘unworthy of life’ is still ringing in my ears. There is still a sign above my life that says: strictly speaking, you have no right to live.”….

Even top Reich-level euthanasia figures, Hans Heinze and Werner Villinger, had flourishing postwar careers as Germany’s leading psychiatrists. Franz Hamburger, who had become emeritus in 1944, never faced trial. The enormous role Hamburger’s Children Hospital played in the killing system also went unrecognized. Hamburger’s student, Elmar Turk, who conducted tuberculosis experiments on children with Hamburger, practiced through the 1990s and drew on his human experiments from the Third Reich. The body parts of children killed at Spiegelgrund continued to circulate among Vienna’s research laboratories, the basis of its physicians’ publications for decades.

Spiegelgrund doctor Heinrich Gross published thirty-eight articles over twenty-five years—several based on the preserved brains of over four hundred children that he had harvested at Spiegelgrund during the Third Reich, collaborating with associates (such as Andreas Rest, who named Rett syndrome). Gross became a preeminent physical in Austria and was awarded the government’s Honorary Cross for Science and Art in 1975. Despite court proceedings against him in 1948 and 1981, Gross managed to evade conviction for murder. A rock solid case against Gross finally headed to court in 2000, but Gross was deemed unfit to stand trial due to advanced dementia—a condition many observers disputed. Gross died in 2005 at age ninety….

In 2002, the remains of Spiegelgrund’s victims were buried and memorialized—including the brains Gross had collected, which were discovered in Spiegelgrund’s basement, in neatly stacked glass jars. *(Thus they buried the evidence of the morphological and structural damages from IG Farben’s munition technologies branched from their ethylene tree)

Asperger was cleared of wrongdoing after the war… Asperger benefited from the vacuum and was appointed interim director of the University of Vienna Children’s Hospital from 1946 to 1949… He enjoyed a long career. In 1957, Asperger was named director of the University of Innsbruck Children’s Hospital; in 1962, Asperger followed in Hamburger’s footsteps as permanent director of the University of Vienna Children’s Hospital. Asperger wrote a textbook, Heilpadagogik, which found success in several editions—and his field of “curative education” expanded and shifted toward mainstream “special education.”

The Curative Education Clinic sent children to Spiegelgrund’s successor institution, Wilhelminenberg…. Anna Theresa Kimmel, seen in Asperger’s clinic, later described her encounter with Asperger. “I stood facing a tall, tall man in a white coat. Light-haired. The size difference was enormous. And I only know that he greeted my mother, and then looked at me and punched me in the stomach with full force. Yes? My reaction was: no howling, nothing, but I probably looked at him angrily. And so he told me, he told my mother that I had aggression.” Kimmel said she was institutionalized, held in a cage bed for a month. Afterward, Kimmel reflected, “I never heard from Asperger again. I don’t know, was I a test subject? Was I a person? Was I a piece of wood? A guinea pig? I have no idea.”…

Asperger held that the souls of the terminally ill youths “were always very different from the ‘normal’” As he put it, “Their fine spiritual differentiation results from a weakening in their primitive vitality through the existing disease—a consequence of the disease. In other words, illness changed children’s souls and permanently aged them, completing their development. It was appropriate that they perished earlier than others. In his 1975 article, “The Dying Child,” Asperger invoked scripture to conclude the point, citing the Wisdom of Solomon: children who die young “live a long life in a short span of time.”…

In Asperger’s view, the doctor’s role was to guide the child and his or her parents, particularly the grieving mother, down the path of death—to “fulfill his noble duty as guide into the realm of the natural.”

In his 1975 article, “The Dying Child,” Asperger also wrote that the doctor should “serve in death.” It is unclear exactly what Asperger meant by the phrase, but juxtaposed it with what he called “active euthanasia.” – Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer

The IG Farben employees, Vienna doctors, destroyed the evidence of the harm of their employer’s munition technology products. Theo Colborn called their benzene technology products, womb terrorists. They didn’t destroy the technologies causing all the harm. They expanded their ethylene tree based munition markets and exterminated the infants and children destroyed by them.
The Last Train From Berlin by Howard K. Smith
“Other vegetables came to count as luxuries. Tomatoes were rationed too for a while, then disappeared altogether to canning factories where they could be preserved and sent to the Eastern front. Two-vegetable meals became virtually extinct. Scarcities were made more severe by the prudence of the food ministry which, having its palms slapped once, began to play it safe by preparing more and more canned goods for the troops in the event that the war should last through the winter….

Ersatz foods flourished. Icing for the few remaining pastries tasted like a mixture of saccharine, sand and cheap perfume. White bread was issued after the third month of the campaign only on the ration cards formerly for pastry. A red coloured paste called Lachs Galantine, resembling salmon in color and soggy sawdust in taste, appeared in restaurants on meatless days. Several strange bottled sauces made of incredible combinations of acid-tasting chemicals made their appearance in shops to answer the public’s growing demand for something to put a taste of some kind in their unattractive and scanty meals…

Cigarettes suffered the most rapid decline in quality… My tobacconist told me “Johnnies” were made of the same dry, powdery, inferior tobacco as other cigarettes, but the leaves were sprayed with a chemical to give them a distinctive flavour and kill their original one. The chemical, he said, was severely damaging to the lungs, which I can believe…

It caused visible pain to the old bar-tender to answer an order for a cocktail saying he was dreadfully sorry but today, precisely today, he had run out of all the ingredients. But perhaps tomorrow. Actually, all he had was some raw liquor the management had been able to squeeze out of a farm-house outside Berlin, Himbeergeist, or a fake Vodka that took the roof off your mouth, or wood alcohol with perfume in it which was served under the name of Sclibovitz, two fingers to a customer and no more…

Civilian hospitals are overcrowded and doctors overworked. Environment, which has a great deal to do with mental health and well-being has grown seedy and ugly. Hours are longer and real wages immeasurably lower than they were before the Russian war. Families are losing their youngest and strongest members, or seeing them some home legless and armless. The horizon of the average German is desolate….

Today, also after two years of war, there are only two meat dishes on the menu, one of which is struck through with a pencil mark along the strategy of the Kaiserhof Hotel. The other is generally two little sausages of uncertain contents, each about the size of a cigar butt. Before the meat they give you a chalky, red, warm liquid called tomato soup, but which a good-natured waiter-friend of mine always called: Ee-gay Farben Nummer zwei nulleex! all of which means, “Dye trust formula number 20-X.” With the meat you get four or five yellow potatoes with black blotches on them…

Hitler’s solution to the crisis was not by making useful goods but by producing the greatest aggregation of arms, which nobody can eat, or wear, in all history…”
Portions from pages 120 – 149)*(You can actually consume munitions, Americans consume so much splenda that it’s the number 1 artificial sweetener. It’s an organochlorine and you can guarantee that it destroys your brain like all the rest of those sulfur chlorine carbon creations…)

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NATO security force assassination methods are documented in the excerpt below. I hope all of my anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-imperialism and communist friends will take the time and read what’s coming. It started a very long time ago and their activities have evolved significantly. This documents how they target and assassinate academics, scientists, journalists, and anti-imperialism group leaders who shine a light on their activities or fight against them. They are the enemy within so it’s important to understand them in their complexity.

“Secrets and Lies: Wouter Basson and South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme by Marlene Burger and Chandre Gould provides important clarity of their organizational structure, technologies they utilize against us all.

Dr. Basson ran the South African Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme for the apartheid government. He grew cholera cultures for use in black townships and against anti-apartheid demonstrators. “I must confirm that the structure of the [Chemical and Biological Warfare] project was based on the U.S. system. That’s where we learnt the most.” – Wouter Basson, M.D., The “Mengele of South Africa.”
I came to learn of this book in reading Harriet Washington’s extraordinary book, “Medical Apartheid.”
“The South African bioterrorism campaign depended upon very close relationships with U.S. scientists. Despite the supposed isolation imposed upon South African scientists by the international embargoes of the 1980s until 1993, Basson and his minions could not have undertaken biological warfare without the support of the U.S. government. From 1981 until 1993, the United States supported Wouter Basson’s weaponization programs by financing close collaborations with U.S. scientists and by sponsoring Basson’s sojourns to the United States for conferences and education. For example, in 1983, Basson attended a closed Department of Defense conference on biological and chemical warfare in San Antonio. During his trial, Basson recounted his participation in a 1981 federal conference in San Antonio with army officers from the United States, West Germany, Japan, Britain, and Canada. He declared, “I must confirm that the structure of the [CBWP] project was based on the U.S. system. That’s where we learnt the most.”
Basson says he was also grateful for expert American consultants, because the CBWP was dependent upon a colorful assortment of American scientists, especially Larry Ford, M.D., of California. Ford and Basson shared strange research proclivities, acerbic racist sensibilities, and a fascination with scientific genocide. Extant medical and legal documents and the testimony of Basson’s former confederates under oath describe their shocking joint-research projects.

According to Ford’s lawyer, he was a chemical-weapons researcher for the U.S. government in the 1980. In 1987, the United States sent him to South Africa to train microbiologists at the military-run Roodeplaat Research Laboratory (RRL), a key component of South Africa’s chemical-weapons program and a front for the apartheid South African Defense Force. Ford returned often to teach RRL scientists how to produce biological agents such as anthrax and botulinum toxin for use as weapons against antiapartheid forces and against blacks in general. He also taught apartheid’s defenders how to transform innocuous objects such as doilies and tea bags into biological weapons. His seminar series, a master class for poisoners, proved popular among South African scientists, who dubbed it “Project Larry.” Lt. Gen. Lothar Neething, head of the apartheid regime’s police forensic laboratory, was in attendance. So was RRL microbiologist Dr. Mike Odendaal, who recalls, “Ford spent an entire day showing us how to contaminate ordinary items and turn them into biological weapons.” He says Ford gave them “ideas about how to infiltrate innocuous objects such as perfume or household items” and place them in close proximity to a potential target.
Ford’s expertise in the toxicology of everyday life was put to use as South African physicians busily set about eliminating the enemies of apartheid. Ford was warmly welcomed within the nation’s top echelon of medical politicians: for example, the home of former surgeon general Dr. Niels Knobel is graced by a prominently placed framed photograph of him and Ford posing with a lion that Ford had shot.”…

Goosen supervised a multitude of biological assaults on black townships, including the release of pathogens and their vectors, such as mosquitoes, to seed disease epidemics there, just as the army and the CIA had released them over Carver Village… Goosen, Basson,and their deputies investigated the use of Mandrax, an amphetamine, and Ecstasy for crowd control, infused township water supplies with treatment-resistant strains of cholera, and deployed napalm and phosphorus against blacks in Namibia and Angola during the 1980s.

Basson also ordered Goosen to suppress black reproduction surreptitiously and suggested the clandestine addition of contraceptives to townships’ drinking water. Basson stressed that this was a direct edict of the South African surgeon general.

Throughout the Cold War, Western newspapers were peppered with sporadic accounts of ethnic and racial bioweapons being developed by South Africa with U.S. assistance. U.S. news media broadly maligned all such reports as “misinformation” disseminated by the Soviet Union to embarrass the United States.

A 1998 London Sunday Times story alleged that Israel already has used South Africa’s research to develop a genetically specific weapon against arabs.” – Medical Apartheid (Portions from pages 373- 378)

“Secrets and Lies: Wouter Basson and South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme” is based largely on contemporaneous reports compiled throughout the Basson trial for the Center for Conflict Resolution. The testimony provided during his trial establishes methods, chemical and biological weapon technologies, its organizational structure, and how they control the program scientists. The truth started coming out in 1989, “Almond Nofomela, a former policeman, sentenced to death for the murder of a farmer, made a shocking confession on the eve of his execution: he had been a member of a Security Police hit squad operating from a farm called Vlakplaas, South-west of Pretoria. When his erstwhile commanding officer, Dick Coetzee, confirmed the claim, the lid was lifted on a can of worms so foetid that no one in apartheid’s corridors of power could escape the stench…” this book provides a clear picture of how imperialism operates to destroy those who fight it. They destroy academics, journalists, and anti-imperialism leaders. US taxpayers are spending billions “in the name of national security” lie.

Chapter 3: Toxins in Little Bottles Excerpt

“During the course of Basson’s marathon trial, 153 witnesses trooped through the Pretoria High Court to testify against the military doctor who was the linchpin of a programme that not only perverted science, but also cost taxpayers millions in rands in the name of national security….

Around the middle of 1983, Basson invited Goosen to become involved in establishing a facility where chemical and biological substances could be tested on animals. It was not long before the initial plan was expanded to include research into the production of biological warfare agents….

While construction was in progress, Goosen began the important task of recruiting scientists to work with him. He sought out former colleagues from the University of Pretoria’s veterinary faculty at Onderstepoort, people he knew and could trust—people who had no problem marrying their patriotism with a desire to practise interesting science and be well paid for it, and who would not question the work being done. Those who fitted the bill had to fill in reams of forms, providing details about every aspect of their lives. Security checks to determine that neither they nor their close friends of family members were secret supporters of any anti-apartheid organizations, the tests to ensure they were ‘emotionally stable.’ Among the first scientists to be recruited and appointed ‘directors’ were veterinarians Dr. Andre Immelman and Dr. Schalk van Rensburg, who was lured away from the Medical Research Council by Basson himself. Once on the payroll, scientists were subject to stringent security in the workplace, barred from discussing their work with colleagues who were not part of their specific research teams. Some scientists believe that their homes might even have been secretly bugged. Returning home one evening after a frustrating day in the labs, one of the Delta G scientists complained to his wife of tensions at work, only to find himself answering to his boss for his indiscretion the following day. Warnings like this kept the scientists in line, made them afraid to challenge the system and powerless to change the course of the program they found themselves involved with.

Goosen testified that he, Basson and Immelmen talked about developing covert chemical and biological weapons such as a substance that could be smeared on a car door handle, which would cause whoever opened the door to be poisoned. They came to the conclusion that the ideal poison for such an application would be an organophosphate, which research had shown was most effectively absorbed through the skin. It was with this kind of application in mind, said Goosen, that paraoxon became the most researched organophosphate at RLL. Paraoxon attacks the involuntary muscle functions, paralysing vital organs and resulting in suffocation within minutes of ingestion. In time, most — perhaps all —of the senior scientists at RLL came to suspect that the substances they were doing research on would be used to eliminate or harm enemies of the state. Goosen said that during one of the informal discussions about how organophosphates could be used, ANC leaders and communists were mentioned as suitable targets for elimination. There was talk, for example, about how hard it would be to murder former South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, and what could be used if an assassin had only one minute to strike. Nelson Mandela, too, was discussed, and the view was expressed that if he could somehow get cancer while in prison, his release would present no real problem….

While Van Rensburg was nominally in charge of the animal research laboratory and oversaw the project to develop an infertility vaccine, Immelman headed the chemical and pharmacological departments. Microbiologist Dr. Mike Odendaal focused his attention on collecting as many cultures as he could find, including some 45 different strains of anthrax, E. coli (which causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea), and Yersina enterocolitica (closely related to the bacteria that causes plague), to name a few. Every organism Odendaal collected was nurtured and grown in sufficient quantities to freeze-dry. The vials of freeze dried anthrax, cholera, Clostridium botulinum and many more were given to Immelman to keep in the walk-in safe he had installed in his office. For security reasons Immelman never told Odendaal what he intended using the pathogens for, but there were times when this information slipped out during casual conversation. So it was that having supplied Immelman with a bowl of sugar contaminated with salmonella, the non-lethal bacteria that induces food poisoning, Odendaal was told that it was destined for Soweto to be used at an ANC meeting. In this instance, unusually, Odendaal received feedback about the results; the salmonella had worked very well, he was told, all the delegates had fallen ill. Testifying in the Basson trial, Immelman said that he had ‘merely been joking’ when he told Odendaal this.

The so-called fertility project of the RLL and Delta G received widespread media attention during the TRC hearings. Van Rensburg and Goosen testified that discussions about the population explosion in South Africa gave rise to the idea of developing a vaccine that would prevent reproduction. Van Rensburg thought that the project, which he believed was in line with the World Health Organization’s attempts to curb rising global birth rates, would bring RRL international acclaim and funding. He was encouraged, he said, by Basson, who told him that the military needed an anti-fertility vaccine that could be administered through food so that female Unita soldiers would not fall pregnant. While skeptical about the reasons given, Van Rensburg committed himself and his colleagues to the development of an anti-fertility vaccine that could be administered orally without the knowledge of recipients. Both Goosen and Van Rensburg believed that the intention was to secretly give the contraceptive to black South African women. Other scientists involved in the project have denied knowing that this was the purpose of their work. Geoff Candy, a scientist at Delta G Scientific, confirmed Goosen and Van Rensburg’s claims, saying that when he was asked to get involved in the project and realised that the intention was to affect the fertility of black women, he knew that he had to ‘get out,’ because he could not morally justify this kind of work. A vaccine of the kind envisaged was never produced.

While all the scientists agree that at first their work centred on understanding how defences against chemical and biological weapons could be developed, the emphasis gradually shifted to the offensive use of biological agents, until Odendaal and some of his colleagues at RRL found themselves making bizarre products such as anthrax-contaminated cigarettes. Immelman was in charge of all military or ‘hard’ projects, as they were known, and for which orders were almost never put in writing. Even soft-centred chocolates were injected with anthrax or botulinum toxin and given to Immelman. Fairly soon after Odendaal joined RRL, he was given a vial of blood by Immelman who told him it came from Basson, had been drawn from a ! Military Hospital patient dying from AIDS and was to be freeze-dried with a view to being used against ‘opponents.’ This is the only record of a virus being kept at RRL and it is not known whether the plan was ever put into practice.

It was James Davies, Special Forces trained veterinarian, who did much of the practical work at RRL. By his own admission a handy man with a toolbox, Davies used a dentist’s drill to make tiny holes in cans and bottles through which Immelman could then inject paraoxon, anthrax, Brodifacoum or any other toxin of choice before Davies soldered the holes shut. Davies admitted — and research files confirmed— that he added Aldicarb to orange juice, botulinum toxin and thallium to beer, Paraquat to whiskey, all deadly mixes. Davies also injected custom-made toxins into chocolates and alcohol, which he then handed back to his boss.

Immelman, now the owner of a game farm in Limpopo province, said he knew from the start that RRL was an SADF front, and explained that paraoxon was synthesised as an active ingredient because it was ‘reasonably easy’ to make and required a lethal dose of only 1 mg per kilogram of body weight, which was quickly absorbed. An added advantage was that if detected post mortem, its presence could always be attributed to parathion, a common agricultural pesticide. In addition, research into paraoxon offered an ideal cover for the establishment of a high-safety laboratory in which research wold be done on the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX (Take special note that all of these were created and brought to industrial scale productions by Nazi IG Farben scientists, Otto Ambros and Fritz Hoffmann.)

Harrowing as the personal testimony of the scientists was, the true horror of the twilight zone explored by some of the country’s finest scientific minds lies in the thousands of documents filed with the Pretoria High Court during Basson’s trial. The Rosetta Stone of the RRL records was a list compiled by Immelman during 1989, titled simply ‘Verkope’ [Sales]. It is a record of the toxins and contaminated items that Immelman handed to people introduced to him by Basson, and provides some insight into the ghastly products dreamed up at RRL.

Clinical toxicologist Professor Gerbus Muller of Stellenbosch University told Judge Willie Hartzengerg that of the 24 items on the ‘Sales List’ covering the period August to October 1989, at least eight are extremely poisonous. One, botulinum, is the most dangerous toxin known to man. It kills by respiratory arrest and is one million times more poisonous than arsenic. Another, Paraquat, is so potent that even with treatment for a low dosage, a 100 per cent mortality rate can be expected. At Roodeplaat, these and other lethal substances were added to cigarettes, chocolates, alcoholic beverages, and toiletries before being supplied to members of the sinister Special Forces hit squad, the Civil Cooperation Bureau, and the Security Police. In some instances, specially adapted screwdrivers, walking sticks and umbrellas were loaded with doses of deadly toxins to be administered to officially approved ‘targets’ in scenarios worthy of a James Bond novel. Basson denied being involved in plans to murder anyone, and said the only reason such research was done was in order to illustrate how easily South African agents or VIPs travelling abroad could be assassinated.

In order to determine how well and how quickly the poisons would work, scientists at RRL tested their potions on primates, pigs and beagle hounds. How many animals met horrible deaths in the process will never be known, but 203 Roodeplaat research files recovered by Basson investigators show a dedicated commitment to the quest. The majority of substances involved cause death by suffocation — an excruciatingly painful process involving paralysis of the central nervous system and collapse of the lungs. An anti-coagulant called Brodifacoum gives rise to massive internal bleeding and fatal brain haemorrhage, while Cantharidine (commonly known as the aphrodisiac, Spanish Fly) causes severe burns in the mouth, throat and vital organs before victims become comatose and die of multiple organ failure.

In RRL’s laboratories, death sometimes came swiftly, within minutes, but it could take hours, even days. Records of clinical tests with cholecalciferol — or vitamin D3 — show that dogs given three consecutive overdoses of the substance took four to seven days to die. Vervet monkeys fed a low dosage over a 30-day period died of heart failure 65 days after first ingesting the substance, suffering nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, headache, itching, disorientation and peripheral nerve damage in the interim. Sodium azide, used industrially in the manufacture of explosives and preservatives, produced symptoms in baboons within three to eight minutes of oral ingestion. Soon after being fed the poison the baboons would have extreme difficulty breathing, their blood pressure would drop and they would lapse into a coma before dying within 30 to 120 minutes. This substance was also tested on pigs and dogs — which, according to the research report, ‘continued to wag their tails, even while in a coma, until their died.’ Tests with Brodifacoum, used commercially in rat poison, caused a monkey to bleed to death from the femoral artery, while organophosphates attacked the central nervous systems of baboons within eight hours of being applied to a small patch of naked skin. The baboons were subjected to protracted torture, being injected with an antidote, atropine, at the first sign of poisoning, only to have the toxin reapplied at 24-hour intervals over a period of up to seven days before succumbing to the inevitable.

Immelman began keeping a record of substances he handed out towards the end of 1988, when Basson introduced him to three men he knew only as Chris, Gert, and Manie. Instructed by Basson to use the codename ‘Willem’ when meeting with the men, Immelman presented himself as a farmer, knowing he had to protect his identity and his link to RRL at all costs. It was these three men who were the recipients of many of the poisons itemized on the Sales List. Immelman claims to have believed they were members of 7 Medical Battalion and felt no compunction when Basson told him to ‘give them anything they want.’ Later, Basson also introduced him to a man he knew only as Koos, with the same instruction. Nothing, says Immelman, left RRL without Basson’s approval.

All Immelman’s meetings — about nine, to his recollection— with Chris, Gert, and Manie were set up by Sarie Jordan, Basson’s secretary at the South African Medical Services (SAMS). The men met in Basson’s office at SAMS headquarters in his absence, or in restaurants, and it didn’t take long for Immelman to realise that the three men were not schooled in pharmacology. He spent a great deal of time talking with them, over coffee at a fast food outlet, about the best ways of administering the poisons, which effects could be expected and how they could be applied to clothing. Before giving Chris a quantity of paraoxon on 4 April 1989, Immelman explained that the most sensitive areas of absorption would be the scrotum and eyelids, and that a shirt collar or waistband of pants would be ideal areas on which to spread the poison. It was not long after this meeting that Immelman read in a newspaper about the poisoning of the Reverend Frank Chikane, a secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches and an outspoken opponent of apartheid. Having made a connection in his own mind, Immelman asked Basson directly if paraoxon had been used. Basson replied that no one knew, ‘not even the Americans.’

Late in 1989, Immelman delivered vials of vibrio cholerae to Koos in Basson’s office. The bacteria were in School laboratory flasks, made of thick glass with screw tops. Former CCB operator Pieter Botes testified during Basson’s trial that he was given two vials of cholera with instructions to use them to contaminate the water supply of a Swapo refugee camp outside Windhoek shortly before Namibia’s pre-independence election in 1989….

Six containers of orange juice, each containing 200 mg of Aldicarb, were delivered to Chris, along with 2 g of vitamin D3, on 7 April 1989, (a fatal dose would be three to four grams). On 15 May 1989, Chris received 70 mg of Catharidine, of which as little as 10 mg — a taste — has been known to be fatal. Koos was given 100 mg of Catharidine in September 1989. Chris also received a number of hypodermic syringes and needles, while 50 sodium cyanide capsules (fatal dose 4 g) were given to Koos and a letter laced with anthrax spores to Basson. All the chocolates and cigarettes laced with anthrax appearing on the Sales List were supplied to Chris.

From photographs shown to Immelman in court, Chris, Gert and Manie were identified as Security Police Officers (whose surnames are protected in terms of a court order). While admitting that he had introduced Immelman to the three men, Basson said this was for the sole purpose of supplying them with sedatives and tranquillisers that could be used during cross-border abductions by the Security Police, and that he had never instructed or authorized Immelman to give them any lethal toxins. Items in the Sales List marked down against his own name, said Basson, had been ‘passed on to scientists’ for further research. Odendaal, the man who laced chocolates and single cigarettes with anthrax, strongly disputed this claim when it was put to him under cross-examination, describing it as ‘ludicrous’. At the time, he said, he was probably the closest thing to an anthrax expert that South Africa had, so who else could have done what further tests? All ‘they’ wanted, said Odendaal, was ‘toxins in little bottles’.

In the broad scheme of things, however, the ubiquitous ‘they’ actually wanted a great deal more — but it was not for the scientists at RRL to know that while they were making toxins, someone in a workshop on the opposite side of Pretoria was designing bizarre instruments that could be used to administer them. Jan Lourens graduated from the Rand Afrikaans University with a degree in metallurgical and mechanical engineering before joining the Air Force, where he worked in the laboratory at Air Logistics Command. It was there that he met up with an old school friend, Philip Mijburgh. It was an encounter that would change the course of Lourens’s life. Mijburgh, a medical doctor and member of Basson’s Special Operations Unit (later 7 Medical Battalion), lost no time recruiting Lourens into the unit or putting his skills to use. Lourens worked closely with scientists at RRL from the start. In 1985, he was introduced by Mijburgh to Goosen, Immelman and Davies, who needed his help for the development of custom-made apparatus to conduct animal experiments with chemical and biological warfare agents. Lourens made a chair that could restrain a primate, with a mechanical arm that could be used to extract blood at a distance. He also constructed a gas chamber large enough for the restraining chair. A baboon strapped into the chair could be placed inside the gas chamber while gases were piped in, to see what effect they would have on the animal. The gas chamber was used on at least one occasion to subject a restrained baboon to the potent CR teargas.

Among the first tasks assigned to Lourens was to set up an independent radio network to link all the vehicles of all Special Operations members. He also modified their Nissan Skylines, souping up the engines and enlarging the fuel tanks to allow a rapid response, in the event of a chemical misshap, by members of the so-called Skyline Squad. Working from Speskop, Lourens came to know some of the staff at EMLC, striking up a friendship with former Selous Scout Philip Morgan, a self-taught armourer with a vivid imagination and the mechanical skills to match. When Lourens became involved in designing a series of ‘special applicators,’ it was Morgan who turned sketches into weapons cunningly disguised as screwdrivers, walking sticks, even a poison-tipped umbrella. Lourens’s friendship with Mijburgh translated into a good relationship with Basson, and by 1987, three years after joining Special Operations, he was firmly ensconced in Basson’s inner circle. His wife, Antoinette, also worked for Project Coast — at the financial and administrative front company, Infladel — and others served as personal assistant to Basson.

Through his position in the Special Operations Unit, Lourens became acquainted with Delta G Scientific, even while the fledging chemical plant still housed in a few offices in the Pretoria suburb of Val de Grace. When construction began on the on the sophisticated research and production planting Midrand, Mijburgh invited him to serve as project manager, a task he willingly accepted. In the heyday of Project Coast, Delta G’s main purpose was production of CR, CR is extremely irritating. It burns the skin, eyes and nasal passages and causes severe flu-like symptoms in anyone who comes into contact with it. Scientists who worked with CR all felt the effects of the agent. The poor safety conditions under which they conducted their experiments left at least two of them chronically ill and unable to continue working in the industry. Delta G staff were also asked to develop defensive measures against chemical warfare agents, such as test kits that could be used by troops in the field.

On completion of the Midrand factory, Lourens was invited to stay on as resident site engineer, but the prospect held little attraction, and instead he discussed with Mijburgh the possibility of removing the defensive arm of the project from Delta G and running it himself. Mijburgh agreed, and at the end of 1986, with funding supplied by Basson, Lourens set up Systems Research & Development in Stardom Park, Randburg. In due course, SRD acquired a number of branches. One of these was Phoenix Service Station, where the super-Skylines were modified and serviced. Another branch concentrated on developing filters and chemical detection appartatus, while SRD Electronics supplied the military with surveillance equipment and debugging devices. A mechanical workshop operating as QB Laboratories became home to Morgan, who left EMLC at Basson’s request, and Bart Hettema’s main task was to pack CR into hand-held aerosol cans for the SA Police, while Morgan concentrated on the custom-made items he and Lourens called ‘applicators’ in English and the generic ‘screwdrivers’ in Afrikaans. These were devices containing secret compartments that could be filled with lethal toxins. Lourens said he received instructions from Basson to make the applicators. Basson, in turn, claims that the orders came from General Kat Liebenberg, who had ‘heard’ that such instruments could be used by covert agents.

Most of the finished products were delivered to Basson by Lourens, though a few were also handed to Immelman or Davies at RRL, where they were tested to check on their efficacy. RRL test reports show that the screwdrivers were tested on pigs, to see if they could operate silently and penetrate the skin in order to deliver their lethal payloads. The first generation screwdrivers were either spring-loaded or contained a low explosive charge that released the chemical substance on impact, while umbrellas were adapted to shoot a poisoned polycarbonate ball into a victim’s body. Polycarbonate was virtually impossible to detect during an autopsy, and Lourens was told that the micro-balls could not be picked up by security X-ray machines. He and Morgan also produced walking sticks that were really injectors and a folding knife-spoon that fitted into a cigarette box. This device was ideally suited for use in prison where spoon stabbings were commonplace. The victim could be stabbed with the spoon, inside which was hidden a container of poison. The intention was for the victim to die, the only visible cause of death being the stab wound. QB also made signet rings with a secret compartment for poison. The unique locking mechanism designed by Morgan allowed Lourens, during the Basson trial, to identify a signet ring used by police agent Leslie Lesia against ANC members in exile in African states.

In March 1988, Lourens quit SRD to focus his attention on the development of personal apparel offering protection against chemical attack. By that time, the defensive side of Project Coast was in a growth phase, with textiles, clothing and filtration systems all being tested against genuine chemicals rather than simulated substances. Leaving SRD in the hands of psychologist Johnny Koortzen, Lourens became managing director of a new company, Protechnik, holding this position until March 1993.

In January 1986, shortly after RRL launched into full swing, Goosen was removed from his position as managing director amid allegations that he was a poor administrator and had taken kickbacks from the building contractors. Goosen was moved to Roodeplaat Breeding Enterprises, a sub-section of RRL that was involved in the supply of guard dogs, and replaced by Special Forces dentist Wynand Swanepoel. The shift in leadership at RRL mirrored by the situation at Delta G Scientific, where Dr. Willie Basson was removed from his post as chief executive on the basis of equally vague accusations of bad management, to be succeeded by Philip Mijburgh. Two years later, Swanepoel asked Goosen to return to RRL to ‘sort out’ problems in the animal research centre, but in February 1989 Goosen found himself out on the street as the result of accusations that he was guilty of a major security breach.

The alleged offense had taken place during a conference in the Kruger National Park. Goosen, whose wife had recently died of cancer, was emotionally fragile at the time, and shortly after the conference suffered a nervous breakdown. To this day, Goosen believes his condition was deliberately induced by the administration of a psychotic drug, and denies he was guilty of a security breach. Nevertheless, he was told by Knobel that the offense was seen in so serious a light that, by rights, he ought to be going to prison. Instead he was told to quit Project Coast and sign a restraint of trade agreement that prevented him from pursuing a research career for 10 years. He also had to sign secrecy agreements, promising not to reveal the nature of the work he did at RLL. In return, he was paid R60 000 — the equivalent of three months’ salary and his contributions to the pension fund. By this time, Basson and Goosen were no longer on speaking terms.

Ironically, scientists who remained at RLL agree that from the moment Swanepoel became managing director, they ceased to be given any clear guidelines from management on what they were expected to do. In the absence of a scientific compass, they simply began working on projects that interested them personally, but did not necessarily have any military value. The microbiologist motivated their research to management by appending the phrase ‘has military application’ to their proposals to ensure they would be approved. This was how one of the junior scientists under Odendaal’s supervision perfected the genetic modification of the E. coli bacterium. Adriaan Botha’s objective was to develop a vaccine that would protect sheep against one of the lethal toxins expressed by Clostridium perfringens bacterium. E. coli can produce far larger quantities of toxin, so the idea was to modify E. coli. While Botha was clear about his intention to develop a harmless vaccine, he was fully conscious that his work could also lead to the development of a dangerous and frightening biological warfare agent.

Portions from pages 28 – 40

NATO security force assassination methods are documented in the excerpt below. I hope all of my anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-imperialism and communist friends will take the time and read what’s coming. It started a very long time ago and their activities have evolved significantly. This documents how they target and assassinate academics, scientists, journalists, and anti-imperialism group leaders who shine a light on their activities or fight against them. They are the enemy within so it’s important to understand them in their complexity.

“During his first tour of EMLC’s facilities, Van der Spuy came across a ‘large quantity’ of chemicals in bulk containers and a carton of what appeared to be clothing in one of the rooms. As he moved towards the box, one of his 140 employees stopped him with a warning not to touch the contents ‘because those clothes are poisoned, and if you put those underpants on, you’ll be dead by tonight.’ Van der Spuy immediately ordered the contents of the room destroyed…. and testified during the Basson trial…

’I went overseas three times to Germany, England, Israel, America to find the best techniques available,’ Viljoen, on whose watch the CBW project was launched, is of the opinion the international community had provided South Africa with the information and the equipment…. Official documents record the use of toxins by the Rhodesian Police’s Special Branch and the Selous Scouts from 1977, although some former Special Branch Operatives have said they were aware of poisons being used as early as 1973. A document dates 24 June 1977 records 809 deaths resulted from poisoned items distributed by the Selous Scouts….

The only Rhodesian scientist known to have collaborated with the security forces in a campaign that claimed at least 900 victims is Professor Bob Symington, head of the Anatomy Department at the University of Rhodesia’s medical school, who subsequently settled in South Africa and became a lecturer at the University of Cape Town…
“According to Knobel, Ford was instrumental in formulating the military’s anti-AIDS policy, and served as adviser to the SADF during the 1991 Gulf War, when he supplied South African military personnel stationed in Israel with a variety of antidotes. He also faxed Knobel information on Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons capability so that the South Africans could protect their embassy staff in Tel Aviv from possible attack. How Ford came by antidotes and information about Iraq’s weapons, and on whose authority he assisted the SADF in this manner, are among the myriad unanswered questions about him. What is known is that in the late 1980’s a mutual acquaintance introduced Ford to James Patrick Riley, an entrepreneur looking for new business ventures. It is unclear whether Riley had any idea what he was getting into by joining forces with Ford, but his attorney, Raymond Lee, insists that Riley was unaware of Ford’s alleged CIA links or his role as bio-warfare adviser to South Africa….But there may have been a deeper motive behind the botched attempt on Riley’s life: his vehement opposition to Ford’s proposed use of South African prostitutes as guinea-pigs for the microcide, which, he claimed, would revolutionise the fight against AIDS. Irvine detectives believe that secret testing of the female suppository did take place in South Africa, and possibly also on American prostitutes. According to Victor Ray, when Riley was questioned about this, ‘he coughed, looked the other way and said: “It might have happened”. As far as Ray was concerned, ‘it probably did’, an opinion borne out by Knobel’s acknowledgment that he had helped Ford gain approval for use of the products made by Biofem in South Africa, but had no further knowledge of the matter…

During D’Saachs’s trial, testimony revealed little or nothing about the FBI’s investigation or Ford’s background, though Riley gave evidence the he believed his ex-partner had worked for the CIA, and that he had boasted of working for American general Willard Wyman, who he said was in charge of a biological weapons programme….

Two years later, when Basson testified in his own defense, he claimed that the primary task of one of the doctors under his command, anaesthetist Graeme Gibson, was to secretly take blood samples from members of the various liberation forces in neighboring states… The AIDS research project was authorised by Project Coast’s Coordinating Management Committee, according to Basson, as part of a study to determine ‘whether AIDS alone would allow the SADF to win the war’.” Portions from pages 14 – 17, 144 – 148

The reason they also used alcohol as a delivery agent is because it would assist in poisoning. Alcohol would have been utilized to disarm the liver rendering it useless against the poisoned assault.

https://renchemista.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/liver-functioning-chemical-synergies-an-excerpt-silent-spring-by-rachel-carson/

Sales List

Phencycladine (Returned)
Thallium acetate
Phencycladine
Aldicarb — Orange Juice
Azide — Whiskey
Paraoxon
Vitamin D
Vitamin D
Cantharadine
10ml Injections
Needles
Needles
Thallium acetate
Aluminum phosphide or Phosphine tablets
Spores and Letter
Capsules of Sodium cyanide
Beer can botulinum
Beer can thallium
Beer bottle botulinum
Beer bottle thallium
Sugar and Salmonella
Whiskey and Paraquat
Mercuric oxycyanide
Baboon foetus
Vibrio cholera
Azide
Capsules cyanide
Cigarettes B anthracis (anthrax)
Coffee chocolates B anthracis
Coffee chocolates Botulinum
Peppermint chocolates Aldicarb
Peppermint chocolates Brodifacoum
Peppermint chocolates Cantharadine
Peppermint chocolates Cyanide
Vibrio cholera
Capsules Propan Sodium Cyanide
Formalin and Piridine
Needles
Cantharadine — powder in packet
Methanol
Vibrio cholera — 10 bottles
Snakes
Mamba toxin (Brought back)
Digoxin
Whiskey + colchicine
B. melitensis
Salmonella typhimurium in deodorant
Culture from letters
B. melitensis
Salmonella typhimurium in deodorant

I think of all the vocal US scientists who died of cancer and more. Rachel Carson, Theo Colborn, Carl Sagan, Lynn Margulis, and Steven Jay Gould all spoke out against imperialism and its weapons.
“Shall we concentrate upon unfounded speculation for the violence of some—one that follows the determinist philosophy of blaming the victim—or shall we try to eliminate the oppression that builds ghettoes and saps the spirit of the unemployed in the first place?” – Steven Jay Gould
And of special note. The book, “The Nazi War on Cancer,” by Robert N. Proctor was dedicated “For Stephan Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Ruth Hubbard, Richard Levins, and the rest of the Bio 106 Gang.”
(I will put a picture of its contents in the messages below. Stephan Jay Gould knew it all.)
Stroke, heart attacks, brain hemorrhage, and cancer were preferred methods to eliminate their enemies.

“The anti-coagulant called Brodifacoum gives rise to fatal brain haemorrhage…” – Toxins in Little Bottles page 33

“The family of Lynn Margulis announced that she died at home on Tuesday, November 22, at the age of 73. She had suffered a serious hemorrhagic stroke on Friday, November 18 – so serious that there was no chance of recovery. Having authored dozens of books and scientific papers, Margulis was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999.
In 2004, she began looking into the evidence against the official account of 9/11. She not only accepted it, but also – always known for her courage – announced her views, writing in 2007:

“Whoever is responsible for bringing to grisly fruition this new false-flag operation, which has been used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as unprecedented assaults on research, education, and civil liberties, must be perversely proud of their efficient handiwork.”

http://www1.ae911truth.org/en/news-section/41-articles/590-dr-lynn-margulis-1938-2011-a-beacon-of-light-for-911-truth.html

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(11)01375-3

The reason they used alcohol as an assassination delivery agent is because it would assist in poisoning. Alcohol would have been utilized to disarm the liver rendering it useless against the poisoned assault. Rachel Carson even explained it in “Silent Spring.”

https://renchemista.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/liver-functioning-chemical-synergies-an-excerpt-silent-spring-by-rachel-carson/

They brutally slaughtered opponents to send a message to others as well. Frank Olson was a CIA bacteriologist who the CIA murdered after he spoke out against the program he found himself in. He was a true hero. He discovered that they were utilizing his work to develop and implement biological weapons being used against North Korea and was deeply upset at that realization. His wife said he was going to quit but instead he was hit hard in the head and thrown out a window of a hotel. A message to other scientists to get in line. His son never gave up trying to find the truth and when his father was moved to join his mother after she passed, he had another autopsy. That autopsy concluded he was murdered. You can all watch Wormwood on Netflix to learn about what the US does to those who refuse to participate in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Regarding the origins of Sarin and VX. Both were Nazis and Operation Paperclip scientists at the United States.

“Dr. Schrader said that he was not involved in full-scale production. That was the job of his colleague, Dr. Otto Ambros…. From Krauch, Major Tilley learned quite a bit more about Ambros. That he had been in charge of technical development of chemical weapons production at Gendorf and at Dyhernfurth. That Gendorf produced mustard gas on the industrial scale, and that Dyhernfurth produced tabun. Krauch also revealed a new piece of evidence. Dyhernfurth produced a second nerve agent, one that was even more potent than tabun, called sarin. Sarin was an acronym pieced together from the names of four key persons involved in its development: Schrader and Ambros from IG Farben and from the German Army, two officers named Rudiger and Linde…

On July 28, 1945, Dr. Hirschkind met with Ambros and Lieutenant Colonel Tarr in Heidelberg. Ambros brought his wartime deputy with him to the meeting, the Farben chemist Jurgen von Klenck. It was von Klenck who, in the final months of the war, had helped Ambros destroy evidence, hide documents, and disguise the Farben factory in Gendorf so that it appeared to produce soap, not chemical weapons. Jurgen von Klenck was initially detained at Dustbin but later released. The Heidelberg meetings lasted several days. When Dr. Wilhelm Hirschkind left, he had these words for Ambros: “I would look forward after the conclusion of the peace treaty [to] continuing our relations [in my position] as a representative of Dow.”

Only later did FIAT interrogators learn about this meeting. Major Tilley’s suspicions were now confirmed. A group inside the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, including his former partner, Lieutenant Colonel Tarr, did indeed have an ulterior motive that ran counter to the motives of CIOS, FIAT, and the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Tilley’s superior at Dustbin, Major Wilson, confirmed this dark and disturbing truth in a classified military intelligence report on the Ambros affair. “It is believed that the conflict between FIAT… and LT-Col Tarr was due to the latter’s wish to use Ambros for industrial chemical purposes” back in the United States.” – Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobson (portions from pages 146 -149, and 157 – 159)

The Nazi origins of the CIA assassination program

“This nerve agent was code-named VX (the V stood for venomous)–a battlefield killer that was three times more toxic than sarin when inhaled and one thousand times more lethal when it came into contact with the skin. Ten milligrams of VX could kill a man in fifteen minutes. VX would be more effective on the battlefield than sarin ever would be; sarin dissipated within fifteen or so minutes, but when VX was sprayed, it stayed on the ground for up to twenty-one days. Now, in 1957, the Chemical Corps began producing VX by the thousands of tons. Operation Paperclip scientist Fritz Hoffmann moved over from synthesizing tabun at Edgewood to working on VX munitions. But Fritz Hoffmann’s more haunting legacy lies in the work he performed for the CIA’s Special Operations Division and the Chemical Corps’ antiplant division. Antiplant agents include chemical or biological pathogens, as well as insects, that are then used as part of a program to harm crops, foliage, or other plant life.

After the death of Frank Olson, the SO Division continued its LSD mind control schemes, But Sidney Gottlieb, the man who had suggested poisoning Frank Olson at the CIA safe house in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, was assigned to also work on the CIA’s assassination-by-poison program. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the chemists at the locus of the program. “He was our teacher,” Edgewood laboratory director Dr. Seymour Silver told journalist Linda Hunt. “He was the guy who brought to our attention any discoveries that happened around the world and then said, ‘Here’s a new chemical, you better test it.'”…..

“During the Vietnam War, I remember one evening we were at the dinner table and the war was on the news,” Gabriella Hoffmann explains. The family was watching TV. “Dad was usually a quiet man, so when he spoke up you remembered it. He pointed to the news–you could see the jungles of Vietnam, and he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to defoliate the trees so you could see the enemies?’ That’s what he said. I remember it clearly. Years later I learned one of Dad’s projects was the development of Agent Orange.”

The army’s herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War started in August 1961 and lasted until February 1971. More than 11.4 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over approximately 24 percent of South Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of uplands and forests and 500,000 acres of food crops–an area about the size of the state of Massachusetts. An additional 8 million gallons of other anti-crop agents, code-named Agents White, Blue, Purple, and Green, were also sprayed, mostly from C-123 cargo planes. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the earliest known U.S. Army Chemical Corps scientists to research the toxic effects of dioxin–possibly in the mid-1950s but for certain in 1959–as indicated in what has become known as the Hoffmann Trip Report. This document is used in almost every legal record pertaining to litigation by U.S. military veterans against the U.S. government and chemical manufacturers for its usage of herbicides and defoliants in the Vietnam War.

Fritz Hoffmann’s untimely death came like something out of a Special Operations Division’s Agent Branch playbook. He suffered a serious illness that came on quickly, lasted for a relatively short time, and was followed by death. On Christmas Eve 1966, Fritz Hoffmann was diagnosed with cancer. Racked with pain, he lay in bed watching his favorite television shows–“Cowboy westerns and Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone,” Gabriella Hoffmann recalls. One hundred days later, Fritz Hoffmann was dead. He was fifty-six years old.” Operation Paperclip by Annie Jacobson (portions from pages 387 – 388)

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U.S. Nerve Gas Hit Our Own Troops in Iraq

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Excerpt from Our Stolen Future’s Chapter, “Fifty Ways to Lose Your Fertility.”

Humans have long used marijuana as a drug because the chemicals it contains act in the brain to alter mood and perception, creating a “high.” But as Hughes and others discovered, these chemicals do more than induce a pleasant mellowness; they interfere with reproduction in a variety of ways. The same compound that makes a pot smoker high also acts on the testicles to reduce the synthesis of testosterone and on the brain to suppress lutenizing hormone, a key hormone that cues ovulation in females and testosterone production in males. Studies have reported that marijuana feminized men who smoked it heavily.
Hughes’s work focused on the way that marijuana interferes with the hormone prolactin, which is produced in the brain and signals the breast to produce milk. Mother rats given marijuana produced no milk, and their pups died of starvation. Hughes later moved on to investigate the effects of plant estrogens on the endocrine system and the hormones that orchestrate reproduction, an area few scientists had explored.

For such a defensive strategy to work, he explains, the plant would logically target females rather than males because a predator’s reproduction is limited. by the number of fertile females. If, for example, a plant managed to impair the fertility of all the males save one, that single male can, nevertheless, fertilize an entire flock of females. But if only a single female is fertile, she can produce only one or two lambs. Plants containing estrogen mimics produce them according to a seasonal pattern that fits perfectly with this strategy. Clover packs the greatest concentrations of estrogenic compounds into the new growth in spring, and when a rabbit or a sheep injures it by munching on these tender shoots, the plant responds by producing even more estrogen at the site of injury, delivering an added dose to predators that continue grazing.

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Inhibition of progenitor cell proliferation in the dentate gyrus of rats following post-weaning lead exposure.

Schneider JS1, Anderson DW, Wade TV, Smith MG, Leibrandt P, Zuck L, Lidsky TI.
Author information

Abstract
Although lead is a potent developmental neurotoxin, the effects of postnatal lead exposure on progenitor cell proliferation in the hippocampus has not been examined. Postnatal day 25 rats were fed a lead containing diet (1500 ppm lead acetate) for 30-35 days and administered bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU, 50 mg/kg, i.p.) during the last 5 days of lead exposure. Animals were killed 24 h after the last BrdU injection. Proliferation of new cells in the subgranular zone and dentate gyrus was significantly decreased in lead-exposed rats compared to control animals that ate a similar diet devoid of lead. These results suggest that postnatal lead exposure can have significant deleterious effects on progenitor cell proliferation and thus the structure and function of the hippocampus.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15527882

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University of Iowa Dr. Terry Wahls Cured Herself of Multiple Sclerosis

“Too many of us have spent years, sometimes decades, failing to provide our cells with the building blocks they need to conduct the chemistry of life properly.” ~ Dr. Terry Wahls

For four years, secondary progressive multiple sclerosis confined Dr. Terry Wahls to a tilt-recline wheelchair. But by using Functional Medicine to create the Wahls Protocol, Dr. Wahls has transformed her health and body: now she walks easily without a cane and commutes by bicycle.

She did this even though, Multiple Sclerosis has no known cure. According to Wikipedia.com:

“Multiple sclerosis (abbreviated MS, known as disseminated sclerosis or encephalomyelitis disseminata) is an inflammatory disease in which the fatty myelin sheaths around the axons of the brain and spinal cord are damaged, leading to demyelination and scarring as well as a broad spectrum of signs and symptoms. […]

MS affects the ability of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to communicate with each other effectively. […] In MS, the body’s own immune system attacks and damages the myelin. When myelin is lost, the axons can no longer effectively conduct signals. […] Although much is known about the mechanisms involved in the disease process, the cause remains unknown. Theories include genetics or infections. Different environmental risk factors have also been found.

Almost any neurological symptom can appear with the disease, and often progresses to physical and cognitive disability. MS takes several forms, with new symptoms occurring either in discrete attacks (relapsing forms) or slowly accumulating over time (progressive forms). […]

There is no known cure for multiple sclerosis. Treatments attempt to return function after an attack, prevent new attacks, and prevent disability. MS medications can have adverse effects or be poorly tolerated, and many patients pursue alternative treatments, despite the lack of supporting scientific study

While I’m not qualified to judge if what Dr. Wahls did for herself constitutes a “cure,” she no longer has apparent symptoms, and she did it by dumping the best “care” and drugs available in the world.

Watch Minding Your Mitochondria: Dr. Terry Wahls at TEDxIowaCity it’s worth every minute:

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Are Any Plastics Safe? Industry Tries to Hide Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Bottles, Containers

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/4/are_any_plastics_safe_industry_tries


AMY GOODMAN: “Are any plastics safe?” That’s the title—that’s the question of a new exposé by Mother Jones that may shock anyone who drinks out of plastic bottles, gives their children plastic sippy cups or eats out of plastic containers. For years, public campaigns have been waged against plastic containing BPA, Bisphenol-A, a controversial plastic additive. But a new investigation by Mother Jones magazine has revealed that chemicals used to replace BPA may be just as, if not more, dangerous to your health than their cousin compound.

BPA is still widely used in everything from the lining of soup cans to printed receipts, even though studies show it mimics the behavior of estrogen in the human body, and have linked it to breast cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Just last week, a study estimated the use of BPA in food and beverage containers is responsible for some $3 billion a year in healthcare costs. But because BPA can hamper brain and organ development in young children, it’s been banned in bottles and sippy cups since 2012. Now new studies show the plastic products being advertised as BPA-free, and sold by companies such as Evenflo and Nalgene, Tupperware, are still releasing synthetic estrogen.

The Mother Jones report goes on to look at how the plastics industry has used a Big Tobacco-style campaign to bury the disturbing evidence about the products you use every day.

We’re joined in Washington, D.C., now by Mariah Blake, staff reporter with Mother Jones magazine.

Mariah, welcome to Democracy Now! Just lay out what you have found.

MARIAH BLAKE: Well, essentially, there is relatively new research showing that the vast majority of plastics, at least commercially available plastics that are used for food packaging, contain BPA-like chemicals, so chemicals that are what they call estrogenic. And the—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what BPA is.

MARIAH BLAKE: So BPA is a chemical that mimics the hormone estrogen. And estrogen plays—we all have estrogen in our bodies. It plays an essential role in various bodily functions and is also very important in human development, so the development of our brain, the development of our organs. However, too much or too little of this hormone, basically, especially during early childhood or prenatally, can set you up for disease later on in life. So, exposure—what the research shows is that exposure in the womb can then lead to breast cancer, diabetes, increased aggression, really sort of a staggering list of health problems later on in life.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about what has happened since BPA has been banned.

MARIAH BLAKE: So, yes, and many people will recall that in 2008 the dangers of BPA became very widely known. There was a scare. Major retailers pulled BPA from their shelves. Customers began demanding BPA-free products, especially for children. And many manufacturers began introducing products that were BPA-free. And all of us who have children have these BPA-free products in our home, most likely. One of the—so—and in many cases, it turns out that the chemicals that were used to replace BPA, or the plastics contained chemicals that were, you know, similar to BPA—at any rate, many of these chemicals had not been tested to see whether they had similar properties to BPA, whether they mimicked estrogen, in essence. And it turns out that many of them do. So, the implication is that they could have similar effects on human health.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your piece by telling us the story of Michael Green and his daughter.

MARIAH BLAKE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that experience.

MARIAH BLAKE: So, Michael Green is—he had a two-year-old daughter. He’s somebody who works in the environmental health field. And he had heard—he had seen research suggesting that BPA-free plastics may have posed some of the same problems to human health. And—but he told me this very moving story about himself and his two-year-old daughter. Somebody else in the family had given his two-year-old daughter this pink plastic sippy cup with a picture of a princess on it, which she just loved. And every night at dinner time, they would have this battle of the wills over this pink plastic sippy cup: He wanted to give her the stainless steel sippy cup; she wanted the pink plastic sippy cup. And in the interest of maintaining peace in the household, occasionally he gave in and gave her this pink plastic sippy cup. But the decision really weighed on him. And I think that those of us who have children—I have a three-year-old son—can relate to this situation, where sometimes you do the expedient thing in the interest of peace, but you wonder if it’s the best thing for your child. And in this case, he decided that he would try to answer that question. And he runs this environment health organization, and he collected sippy cups from Wal-Mart and Toys”R”Us—Babies”R”Us, I’m sorry—and he sent them to an independent lab in Texas to be tested. And he found out that in fact roughly a third of them did contain estrogen-like chemicals.

AMY GOODMAN: And that pink sippy cup?

MARIAH BLAKE: His daughter’s sippy cup was leaching estrogenic chemicals. So his fears were founded.

AMY GOODMAN: And what can that do to her?

MARIAH BLAKE: This is the big question. We know a lot about BPA. BPA is one of the most studied chemicals on the planet. And we know that these chemicals generally are associated with a range of negative health effects. But the specific effect of any given chemical varies slightly from chemical to chemical, and we actually don’t know what chemical is leaching out of that sippy cup. So it’s impossible to know. I mean, there’s a very high correlation with breast cancer, for example, with all of these estrogenic chemicals, and with certain developmental problems. But other specific diseases vary from chemical to chemical. So, Michael Green, the way he describes it is an unplanned science experiment that we’re doing on our families all of the time.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion and talk about Big Tobacco, what Big Plastic has learned from Big Tobacco. We are talking to Mariah Blake, a staff reporter with Mother Jones. Her story is in the new issue of the magazine. It’s called “The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics: And the Big Tobacco-Style Campaign to Bury It.” Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We are with Mariah Blake, staff reporter for Mother Jones magazine. “The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics: And the Big Tobacco-Style Campaign to Bury It” is her new piece. What is the campaign to bury the information, Mariah Blake?

MARIAH BLAKE: Well, there are multiple facets to the campaign, but the primary—the primary objective is to cast doubt on the scientific evidence linking these chemicals to human health problems. So—and there are various ways this is done. In the case of BPA, for example, the industry funded studies, which were biased studies that found that this—that the chemical was not harmful to health. And there’s a sort of network there. They published them in certain journals that, in many cases, had links to the tobacco industry. They relied on scientists that, in many cases, had helped to discredit the science linking smoking and secondhand smoke to disease. So, in many ways, this is—they didn’t only borrow strategies and tactics from Big Tobacco; they are actually relying on the same cadre of experts that Big Tobacco relied on to bury—to bury the truth about smoking.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a video made by the plastics industry featuring the vice president of Eastman’s specialty plastics division, Lucian Boldea, speaking in the video made by the company. A pregnant woman is one of the people shown buying plastic products as Boldea speaks.

LUCIAN BOLDEA: We understand that there are concerns about plastic materials that are used in consumer products that consumers use every day. Those products include water bottles, baby bottles and food storage containers. We can see how available information about plastic materials can be confusing and how it can be difficult for consumers to tell what is really safe. We want you, the consumer, to know the facts behind our clear, tough material named Tritan. Consumers can feel confident that the material used in the product is free of estrogenic activity.

Consumers should have high expectations of the products that they use, and no one is tougher on our products than the researchers and engineers at Eastman Chemical. Most importantly, we have used reputable, independent, third-party laboratories that have used well-recognized scientific methods to prove that Tritan is free of estrogenic activity. Numerous regulatory agencies around the world have independently reviewed our data and have approved the product for use in food contact applications. Some of the world’s most recognized brands trust Tritan as their ingredient.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Lucian Boldea, who is president of Eastman Chemical’s specialty plastics division. Can you respond to this, Mariah Blake?

MARIAH BLAKE: Well, the Eastman product, called Tritan, which is the product that Boldea is speaking about in this video, is actually one of the primary focuses of my investigation. A number of independent scientists have tested this product and found that it is actually more estrogenic than polycarbonate, which is the plastic that contains BPA. And Eastman Chemical, according to internal documents which were released as part of a lawsuit, has taken pains to suppress the evidence showing that its products—or that this product, in particular, is in fact estrogenic.

AMY GOODMAN: So how is it the EPA isn’t regulating this?

MARIAH BLAKE: Well, and this is one of the most surprising things to me when I read this—when I was reporting the story. So, there are about 80,000 chemicals in circulation in the United States. Virtually none of those chemicals has been tested for safety, or a very, very small fraction of those chemicals has been tested for safety. In general, chemicals are presumed safe until proven otherwise under the U.S. regulatory system. So, when a chemical like BPA is removed from a production line, the industry will substitute another chemical that is untested, and we really, in many cases, just don’t know the health effects of that chemical. So, it’s largely an unregulated realm.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about George Bittner.

MARIAH BLAKE: OK. George Bittner is a neuroscientist at the University of Texas, and he has launched an independent lab called CertiChem—it also has a sister company called PlastiPure—and it tests products for estrogenic activity. And he—working with a prominent Georgetown professor, he and his staff tested, I think it was, 455 commercially available plastics that are on the market and published a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives, which is the premier NIH journal, which found that virtually all commercially available plastics have estrogenic activity. And among the plastics he tested were Tritan products, several Tritan products. And this publication, this finding, prompted a pretty big backlash from the industry. So he ended up being targeted by the industry as a result and, in fact, was sued by Eastman, which is—many of the documents that formed the basis of my story were released as a result of that lawsuit.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to read from a memo that Eastman’s senior chemist, Emmett O’Brien, wrote after customers began asking about George Bittner’s tests that showed that Tritan may still be estrogenic. O’Brien describes a meeting with Whole Foods executives who were considering replacing their polycarbonate bulk food bins with ones made from Tritan. He wrote, quote, “We called Bittner a mad scientist. They didn’t know his name actually. They asked twice, by two independent people, what we thought of them. I hemmed and hawed (ducked and dodged) saying I prefer not to comment, but we joked and pushed and flat out said the guy was ‘shady’ — with this non-stereotypical crowd it was a good term.” O’Brien added, “They asked if they could do their own tests — I mentioned the cost is very high and they were quick to chime in that the tests take very long.” Can you respond to that, Mariah Blake?

MARIAH BLAKE: I think you chose the most telling possible quote. So this was effective—this was the strategy they used. Firstly, they worked to discredit Bittner, and they did this through a campaign of personal character assassination and by calling his business practices into question. And secondly, they worked to discredit the science. So, one of the things that Eastman did was they claimed that the test that Bittner is using, which relies on a specialized line of breast cancer cells, had been rejected by the EPA, when in fact it hadn’t. The EPA is considering using this very line of breast cancer cells for its own screening program for what they call endocrine-disrupting chemicals. BPA is one of those.

So, the other thing they did was they commissioned their own research, so they paid labs to perform research which found that Tritan was not estrogenic. And—but if you look at—if you look at the research closely, you’ll see that it is—the studies are essentially designed in a way that guarantee that estrogenic activity will not be found. So, for instance, they use a type of rat; it’s called a Charles River Sprague Dawley rat. This rat is known to be insensitive to estrogen, so it can withstand doses, according to one Japanese study, a hundred times higher than a human female can withstand, with—and show absolutely no effect. They also used doses that are below what is known as the no-observable-effect level, so the doses that are known not to cause an effect. And they then published their own study in a scientific journal, which is—has numerous tobacco industry ties, finding that Tritan was in fact not estrogenic. So, that is essentially how they responded to the finding that their product contained these chemicals that are potentially harmful to human health: They attempted to cover it up.

AMY GOODMAN: Your report cites some leaked minutes from a 2009 meeting of the BPA Joint Trade Association, whose members include the American Chemical—the American Chemistry Council, Coca-Cola, Del Monte. During the meeting, they explored messaging strategies that included using what they called, quote, “fear tactics.” For example, “Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?” The attendees agreed that the “holy grail” spokesperson was a, quote, “pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA.” Mariah?

MARIAH BLAKE: Yes, and this is one of the most disturbing things I discovered during the course of reporting this, is that in their efforts to portray plastics as safe, they oftentimes target the groups who are most vulnerable to the effects of these chemicals. So, prenatal exposure and exposure during early childhood is potentially the most harmful, and oftentimes the marketing of these products targets pregnant women, targets families with children. And also, Eastman, for example, in their efforts to portray their products as safe, also targeted these specific groups.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Nalgene bottles, Evenflo—is it Evenflo?—Tupperware, Rubbermaid, CamelBack?

MARIAH BLAKE: Yes, all of these companies produce at least some products that are made with Tritan, so—and they’re not alone. There are hundreds, probably, of companies that use this. This is the only plastic on the market that markets itself as being free of all estrogenic activity, so many companies that cater to consumers who are concerned about their health and many of the high-end consumer brands have started using this plastic. I think the thing to keep in mind is that Eastman misrepresented their product to their customers, as well. So these brands are not necessarily to blame for this. They have been told by Eastman that Eastman produced—performed independent, third-party testing and found no evidence of estrogenic activity. And so, in many cases, it appears that these companies are trying to do the best thing for their customers, but they were not given—they were not given accurate information about the plastic that they use in their products.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, NPR did a report, “Maybe That BPA In Your Canned Food Isn’t So Bad After All.” Can you talk about that?

MARIAH BLAKE: Yes. So, this is based on a recent study that was performed by FDA scientists. This is a $30 million taxpayer-funded study. And the FDA used many of the same tactics that the industry uses. For instance, they used the Charles River Sprague Dawley rat. The other thing about this study is that the lab appears to have been contaminated. So the control group of rats—these are the rats that are supposed to not be exposed to BPA, so that you can—you have some sort of a baseline to measure the animals that have been exposed to this chemical—they were somehow accidentally exposed to BPA. I have been talking to scientists about this and am planning to write about this later this week. And the academic scientists I have been speaking to say that this essentially—this raises very serious questions about the validity of the findings, and it’s unclear whether any conclusions can be drawn based on this study.

AMY GOODMAN: What most shocked you in all your research, Mariah?

MARIAH BLAKE: Boy, that’s a good question, because there were a lot of—a lot of shocking things I discovered. I would say there’s a couple things. One, the fact that so few of the chemicals that are in the products we use every day have been tested for safety. So, as I said, there are 80,000 chemicals that are in commercial use in the United States; only a tiny fraction of those have been tested for safety.

Two, how easy it is for the industry to bias that safety testing in their favor. I had—obviously, many of us know about Big Tobacco and the way they were able to essentially buy science saying their products were safe. But I was not aware that that was happening on such a grand scale today. And it really is. You know, plastics—as I worked on the story, it became evident to me that plastics—that this is not the only industry—the plastics and chemical industry are not the—is not the only one that is using these tactics. These tactics are fairly widespread.

And I guess, on a micro level, one of the things that surprised me most, in Bittner’s testing, he looked at various types of commercially available plastics, and one of the types of plastic that was most frequently estrogenic was the corn-based plastic, so the plastic that is biodegradable, that you often find in restaurants—health food restaurants, health food stores, that this is potentially one of the most harmful types of plastic.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that again.

MARIAH BLAKE: So, Bittner looked at various kinds of plastic, Bittner and his colleagues, when they tested plastics. There’s a variety of different kinds of plastic—polyurethane, PET-P, polycarbonate—all these different kinds of plastic. So he broke it down by types of plastic. He tested a number of samples of each one. And he—in the final paper, they showed which ones—what percentage of each type of plastic tested positive in their tests. And there is a type of plastic that is—frequently you’ll find it in Whole Foods, you’ll find it in health food stores. It is corn-based, and it is marketed as biodegradable. Oftentimes there are forks made out of this, for example, in health food restaurants. I believe the statistic was 95 percent of samples made out of this kind of plastic tested positive for estrogenic activity.

AMY GOODMAN: So what are you going to do with your three-year-old? What have you decided to use?

MARIAH BLAKE: Well, what I’ve already done is removed all plastic from my home. So, I have switched to natural materials. We use glass or stainless steel for our Tupperware, for our sippy cups, for everything that we possibly can. Plastic is unavoidable, so we still buy food packaged in plastic, because there is no alternative. But we try to minimize it.

AMY GOODMAN: Saran Wrap?

MARIAH BLAKE: Saran Wrap, actually, in Bittner’s tests, I believe it was somewhere around 99 to 100 percent of plastic wraps tested positive for estrogenic activity.

AMY GOODMAN: And where does the EPA come down when you question them about when they’re going to be regulating some of this, in the way that they regulated BPA?

MARIAH BLAKE: Well, the EPA still does not regulate BPA. The FDA—the FDA banned BPA in sippy cups and bottles at the request of the industry. So—and they still—the agency still insists that BPA is safe. So the industry asked the FDA to ban it, because they wanted to reassure parents that their products are safe. There has been no meaningful regulation of any of these chemicals, with the exception of phthalates. And in the case of the EPA, they have a program which was supposed to screen these 80,000 chemicals for what’s called endocrine disruption. So, endocrine-disrupting chemicals are chemicals that mimic hormones, like BPA. And they—this was supposed to be at least partially done by 2000. They still haven’t fully vetted a single chemical. So the industry has managed to throw stumbling blocks in their path. And delay is the name of the game, essentially, sowing doubt and delay. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And how much does the plastic in water bottles and juices leach into the water and the juices?

MARIAH BLAKE: PET or PETE, which is most commonly used for water bottles, is—I believe 75 percent of samples in Bittner’s study leached estrogenic activity. There is another study performed by a scientist in Germany which also found that this particular type of product was estrogenic. So, it seems, based on the available evidence, that many or most of these bottles leach estrogen.

AMY GOODMAN: And the longer the bottle of water you buy sits, is the water becoming increasingly contaminated?

MARIAH BLAKE: Well, there are certain factors that increase the risk of these chemicals being released. So, exposure to UV rays, heat, if they’re put in a dishwasher, these are the things that are known to increase—increase the risks that these chemicals leach out of plastics. So, with reusable plastics, in particular, this is a concern. If you boil them, if you put them in your dishwasher, if you leave them in your car, that causes plastics to break down, and it’s more likely that estrogenic chemicals will leak into whatever those containers contain.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mariah Blake, we want to thank you for your research, staff reporter with Mother Jones magazine. Her story is just out in the new issue; it’s called “The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics: And the Big Tobacco-Style Campaign to Bury It.” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org. You can also follow her on Twitter. Later today, she’ll be doing a Twitter chat with readers.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/tritan-certichem-eastman-bpa-free-plastic-safe

The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics

And the Big Tobacco-style campaign to bury it.

—By Mariah Blake | March/April 2014 Issue – MotherJones


Chasing Molecules by Elizabeth Grossman

An excerpt from the chapter, “The Polycarbonate Problem.”

BPA, Benzene, Phenols, & Carbonyl Chloride (also known as Phosgene)

Although it’s only in the past few years that news of bisphenol A’s health impacts began to reach a nonscientific general public–news that has since spread rapidly–it was first recognized as a synthetic estrogen in the 1930s. Papers published in the journal of Nature in 1933 and 1936 describe its estrogenic effects on lab rats. These papers also commented on the possible carcinogenic activity of materials with similar or comparable composition to bisphenol A–specifically materials synthesized from petroleum (from which bisphenol A is ultimately derived) and coal tar.

Some two decades later, bisphenol A was launched into everyday life with the development of commercially produced polycarbonates. Major production of these plastics began in the United States in the late 1950s after a General Electric engineer named Daniel W. Fox formulated a material based on BPA that GE called Lexan. The invention was not so much deliberately planned as it was the result of what Fox called his ability to take “a few clues and jump to conclusions that frequently panned out.”

While experimenting with different materials that might ultimately make a good moldable polymer, Fox decided to work with bisphenols, compounds derived from petroleum processing that were then being used to make various epoxy resins. As molecules, bisphenols have a structural feature that makes them useful as potential chemical building blocks. Attached to their hydrocarbon ring is what’s called a hydroxyl group, an oxygen and hydrogen that together form a site to which other molecules can bond. This structure is common to both synthetic and naturally occurring compounds, a coincidence that will later turn out to be important to how bisphenol A behaves.

Fox’s interest in the hydroxyl group was as a polymer building site, not for its biological activity. But when attached to a hydrocarbon ring as it is in bisphenol A, the entire chemical grouping becomes a molecule known as a phenol–an aromatic hydrocarbon, a ring made up of six carbon atoms and five hydrogen atoms plus a hydroxyl group. Phenols are commonly made by oxidizing benzene, which essentially means adding oxygen to benzene. Phenols are toxic, but they are also known for their antiseptic properties and so were used to kill germs in the nineteenth century surgical procedures.

This molecular group consisting of six carbon-five hydrogen rings with a hydroxyl group attached, however, is also part of the structure of substances produced naturally by the human body, compounds that include estrogen and thyroid hormones. Introducing a manufactured chemical that includes the phenol group into a cellular environment may therefore pose a problem because the synthetic material may compete biochemically with the similarly structured naturally occurring chemical. Thinking in green chemistry terms, the presence of a phenol group on a synthetic, therefore, should be a sign to investigate that substance’s potential as an endocrine disruptor.

The potential cellular toxicity of phenols has actually been known for decades. Research done in the 1950s, written about by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, discussed the mechanisms by which pesticides constructed with phenols had the ability to prompt oxidation processes that upset cellular metabolism. These reactive chemical groups can disrupt formation of enzymes vital to energy production, which in turn may interfere with how an organism produces and differentiates cellular material. These processes of cellular reproduction are involved in virtually every bodily system, from how an individual processes sugars and calcium to how its reproductive system functions. Carson described the introduction of xeniobiotic phenols as thrusting “a crowbar into the spokes of a wheel. Had Fox been a green chemist, our current synthetic landscape might look very different.

But because Fox and his colleagues were focused on functional performance and on working with readily available chemical ingredients, bisphenols seemed a good choice. As an additional building block that might combine with the bisphenol molecules’ hydrocarbons to yield a useful polymer, Fox chose a chlorine compound called carbonyl chloride. Carbonyl chloride was then–and is currently–a common ingredient in the synthetics known as isocyanates that are used to make any number of products, including polyurethanes that go into varnishes, paints, and plastic foams. By the 1950s it was known that chlorinated hydrocarbons made useful synthetics so this was a logical route for Fox to follow–but no one had yet made the kind of moldable, shatter-resistant plastic that Lexan turned out to be.

If you’re building a polymer, a linked chemical chain in effect, you need lots of the same repeating pieces; ideally you’ll work with shapes that are easy to find and lend themselves to chemical bonding. It’s here that a Tinkertoy or Lego analogy comes to mind. To add pieces to a chemical structure, you need sites where new sticks and building blocks can be attached. So it was with the choice of bisphenols and carbonyl chloride, which lend themselves to such bonding and were both readily available industrial chemicals. Had Fox been practicing green chemistry, however, he would never–even with what was known in the 1950s–have launched a product that required copious quantities of carbonyl chloride.

Carbonyl chloride is also known as phosgene and is so toxic that it was used as a chemical weapon during World War I. The isocyanates it’s used to make are also highly toxic. One such compound, methyl isocyanate, was the gas involved in the deadly 1984 disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Lest anyone wonder if nerve gas is lurking in your bike helmet or CD cases, however, let me quickly explain that no phosgene or even any chlorine ends up in the final bisphenol A polymer; the chlorine compound is simply a reagent, an ingredient that enables the desired chemical bonding to take place.

Yet speaking to an interviewer in 1983, Fox acknowledged that using large quantities of a chemical such as phosgene was indeed hazardous. But, Fox continued, it “was not a totally frightening undertaking because we had good advice. I would say that we have been tightening up our whole phosgene handling ever since, investing in an awful lot of money in trying to make the stuff doubly safe and then triply safe and quadruply safe.” Still, the interviewer pressed, “Has there ever been a problem?” To which Fox responded, “We have had one or two small discharges. To my knowledge, I don’t think GE advertised it, but I think we probably had a ‘casualty’ from phosgene.” Did this give anyone second thoughts about going into business? “I don’t think it did,” Fox replied.

At the time Fox was working, new material inventions like carbonates were just that–inventions that came first, with applications and markets found later. “When we invented polycarbonates in the early 1950s we had a polymer with an interesting set of properties and no readily apparent applications,” Fox said in 1983. But what was known about polycarbonates’ behavior early on that might have hinted at what’s since been discovered about their physical and biological behavior” Could this information have been used to prevent what are clearly problems of chemical contamination? Endocrine-disruption science is relatively new, but some of what was known early on about bisphenol A and polycarbonates would seem to indicate a material perhaps not ideally suited for use, say, with food, heat, and dishwashing detergents.

That polycarbonates built from bisphenol A were vulnerable to certain detergents, solvents, and alkali solutions (household ammonia would qualify) has been known since at least the 1970s. Ammonium hydroxide (essentially a solution of ammonia in water) was discussed as a possible way to break polycarbonates down to its chemical constituents–for materials recovery and reuse and as a way to remove unwanted polycarbonate from another surface. It was also known that various additives used to modify polycarbonate mixtures could leach from the finished plastics when they came into contact with certain liquids. Documents filed with the Federal Register in 1977 list chloroform, methylene chloride, and chlorobenzene among these additives. (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers chloroform and methylene chloride suspected carcinogens, while chlorobenzene is known to cause liver, kidney, and nervous system damage and produce a precancerous condition in lab rats.) Correspondence between GE Plastics Division personnel in the 1970s and 1980s also voiced concern over the presence of chlorobenzene in water stored in polycarbonate bottles (but not bottles made by GE as it happened) and about how the stability of these polymers might affect their ability to be used with food.

A memo circulated within the Lexan division of GE in 1978 also noted that “through reaction with water,” polycarbonate resin can degrade. “The two largest applications of Lexan resin for which hydrolytic stability is critically important are baby bottles and water bottles,” ran the 1978 memo.

In each application the finished parts are subjected to conditions which will cause, after prolonged treatment, molecular weight reduction. However, in each application, actual product failure is usually observed before significant molecular weight reduction is detectable by the usual techniques…..Baby bottles are subjected to autoclaving at 250 degrees F in saturated steam and fail under these conditions by becoming opaque, and sometimes by shrinking and deforming. Milk and water bottles are washed in aqueous solutions of alkaline or caustic cleaning agents and fail by stress cracking. The relationship between practical failure modes and the fundamental physical and chemical processes involved is not fully understood.

That polycarbonates might degrade when heated, washed, or exposed to sunlight was also discussed in company memos in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Three decades later, the plastics industry assures consumers that such wear and tear of polycarbonate baby bottles poses no health concerns for infant users.

Pages 58 – 62

To read more about this extremely informative book and sale information click on the link below.

 

Chasing Molecules

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The Original Common Core: Why Aren’t We Teaching Rachel Carson in Schools?

by Robert Shetterly

August 08, 2014

by Common Dreams

This is what you shall do: love the earth and the sun and the animals… — Walt Whitman

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962, but I suspect for most people reading it today the information would be fresh, enlightening, and alarming. I can say that with some confidence because though I had read the book many years ago, have been an activist on many environmental causes that build on Carson’s work, keep up to date on ecological issues, and painted her portrait, I was shocked when I read her book. Don’t take my word for it. Go to your library and get a copy, read it on some electronic device, buy it used, but read it!

The shock arises form a number of factors. By 1962 she knew an enormous amount about the workings of chemicals and pesticides at micro and macro levels; she could describe the potent mechanisms that made them into carcinogens; it was already clear to her—to science—that most pesticides were counter-productive: Insects adapted to them and became resistant very quickly. More and stronger pesticides were always needed, and the poisons persisted in the environment, useless to kill pests, but incredibly potent in destroying the health and fate of many other species—including humans. In fact, nature did a better job of handling insect predation than chemicals. Carson accepted that pesticides were occasionally necessary but only with extreme care.

However, at the core of my response to Silent Spring are a profound sense of an opportunity missed and a profound failure of education. Think for a moment about the term “common core” that is used to describe the basic goal of education today. What is the core that all living things share in common? It’s the reality of nature, this Earth, the laws of nature, our connections in the biological web to all living species, our common evolution and destiny, our sacred duty to pass on a healthy environment. Any system of education for all children must teach that common core—from nursery school on. If we fail to teach that reality, we have failed as educators. Period. Our common core is not math and reading and critical thinking. Those are important skills. I’m sure the CEOs of Monsanto, Dow, and Exxon are critical thinkers. Our common core is our integral relationship to nature. First teach reality, then the skills needed to live in harmony with it. Then find a unique passion for learning and living in every child. Then teach that all economies must adhere to nature’s laws—not the other way around.

I wish that after 1962, every school in this country had started teaching the science and values of Rachel Carson’s book. Rachel Carson would have agreed with Russell Libby, a great advocate of local and organic farming from Maine who said, “If contamination is the price of modern society, then modern society has failed us.” She put it this way: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides’, but ‘biocides.’”

By the third grade every kid in this country should know what Rachel Carson meant by: “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.” We should all know what she meant when she said, “…we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look around and see what other course is open to us.” And everyone should understand that cancer is an environmental disease. It’s epidemic because of the pollutants and poisons we have put in the environment. To continue to treat the symptoms —trying to find cures—rather than confronting the causes, serves the profits of the medical and drug and chemical industries. By the 5th grade, we should understand the function of the liver and what happens to it when overtaxed by chemical pollutants. We should know that the leading cause of death in children is cancer.

Why don’t we teach our kids these things? Aren’t they supposed to learn facts that will make their lives better and healthier? And the values to implement them? Is Rachel Carson’s work not taught because she is too political? Why are facts about the essentials of biology and ecology political? Should Rachel Carson be taught as evolution and climate change are taught in many schools — one of several possible ways to think about “facts?”

Listen up students, it just could be that God put elements in nature so we could recombine them into malathion and dieldrin. Praise God. He put mountains over coal so we could have fun blowing them up to get it. Hallelujah! He created all living species in 6 days. Awesome! And He promised, if we would burn enough fossil fuel, a nice warm blanket of carbon dioxide to tuck us under at night. Thank You, God.

What a gift Rachel Carson gave us! What a tour de force to have done all that research. She collected scientific data from all over the world and had the temerity to write it all down when the US was in thrall to the chemical companies. With great clarity that anyone can understand—unusual for a scientist—she explains the biological mechanism of chemically induced mutations. She explains how poisons kill, how toxins interrupt the reproductive process of many species and why cancers have different gestation periods. And her science is woven into an ecologically moral philosophy.

And after discussing the atomic structure of chlorinated hydrocarbons (DDT is one), she describes the death throes of robins and squirrels as their collateral damage. The deaths she witnessed happened in the 1950s, but her writing is so vivid, so present, that I found myself outraged and grieving for each one. What she did not know yet, but was implicitly predicting, was the mass extinction of species that is taking place now.

People often date the beginning of the modern environmental movement from the publication of Silent Spring. The reaction to the book is credited with the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. And Earth Day. But those outcomes have done little to stem the flood of over 80,000 chemicals in our environment now, 98% of them untested for human and ecological health. Rachel Carson is our common core. Our survival. Our kids need to be growing up with a firm ethic that would stem this flood of chemicals no matter how much money is involved.

Rachel Carson said, “The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to call itself civilized.”

Do we have the right to call ourselves civilized because of our wealth and power and ingenuity, or only when we act with the wisdom our children and grandchildren can emulate for generations, treating the environment and their bodies with the care they deserve?

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http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/08/original-common-core-why-arent-we-teaching-rachel-carson-schools

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